Touring Europe in a Motorhome is EASIER with these

If finding places to stay is one of your major concerns for touring Europe with your motorhome or campervan, this video is for you. I know many people, myself included, feel overwhelmed when first road tripping in Europe, especially when it comes to campsites, airs, approved overnight spots and wild parking. In this video I'll break down the various options, pros and cons for each and how to make the best use of them. If you're new here, welcome. Hi I'm Cat from the Motorhome Travel website Wandering Bird and I'm here to help motorhome and campervan owners who want to take their vehicle to new places and countries but are confused by the various options until today. So let's get into it. So let's work through this little list that I've got. So at the top campsites. Campsites work exactly the same way as they do in the UK. Campsites are fairly easy to find. There are a couple of ways that I find them. The first is using the app Park4Night, that's with the number four and you can find campsites on there, you can find details, you can find websites. There's loads of information you can actually get on the Park4Night app but I tend to find if you go through to the campsite website you obviously find more information about their facilities and whether they're dog friendly and all of this kind of thing which is quite important to know. If you are traveling in the middle of peak season, high summer and you want a campsite that's near a beach, that's got a kids club, that's got a surf school, that's got incredible swimming pools or a decent restaurant or if you want what I would say a popular campsite in the middle of the popular time, absolutely book it up in advance. Especially if you're going somewhere like say the Italian lakes that is insanely busy in July and August and the likelihood of you getting a decent spot if you just turn up is not that high. So yeah if you're traveling in the busy times to a busy area, absolutely. Or if there's a campsite you definitely want to, perhaps you're meeting friends there or it's a place you want to go back to or something, then yeah absolutely book it up and that way you know for sure that you have got your spot. However, if you're traveling out of the peak season or you don't mind so much about where you go, you want to go to a rough area but most places have got more than one campsite, especially around a busy town or city, then if you're a little bit more flexible, prepared to come inland a bit or away from the most popular touristy areas, then you could absolutely find a campsite. Even in the peak of high summer you can find places that have got availability for you. There is a website that I've used in the past called PitchUp and they actually have got campsites in Europe. I use them all the time in the UK but they do have some campsites in Europe. They don't have every campsite on there because obviously the campsite has to sign up to PitchUp and I'm assuming they give them some form of commission for using the services but you can find campsites in there that have got availability if you really need to use it. The other thing I recommend you do if you are able to travel outside of the school holidays is get a scheme called the I call it ACSI, people laugh at me they call it AXI, it's spelt ACSI so that's what I'm gonna call it. And basically if you go on the ACSI website you can find something called a camping card and the camping card is this scheme where a load of campsites from all over the place have actually got together and they've said well if they are part of your scheme and they come to stay on the campsite we'll give them a discount and the discount can be as much as 40% for the night. It's a lot of money to save so if you are traveling a lot out of peak time then yeah I would definitely get an ACSI camping card that will really help you. Now the thing that I love about touring in Europe with a motorhome or a campervan is the flexibility that they offer. Now Europeans like motorhomers, they like campervaners, they want to encourage them to visit their towns and their villages and even their cities and get you into the area. So rather than sticking you a billion miles away where it's impossible to get anywhere from that, they have created a network of approved overnight parking places which are called AIRS in France, they're called SOSTERS in Italy and they they're the same thing, you can find them all over Europe. And the way that these AIRS work, so you can't book them in advance, you can find out where they are and you can head in that direction but if it's all four when you get there it's literally first-come-first-served so you would then need to move on to find another one. And some of them are free which is brilliant and I've seen some fantastic ones all over Europe actually which are absolutely free, it's brilliant. Some of them are, most of them I would say now, have got a small charge anywhere from 5 euros to 15 euros for the night so a heck of a lot cheaper than a big campsite. Not many of them have got electric hookup although a few that I've used do and a few of them have got services but not all and by services I mean places to empty your grey waste which is more common so I would say the majority have probably got somewhere to empty your grey waste and then somewhere to empty your toilet which if they do have it will probably be for an additional charge so top tip is to keep your one and two euro coins because you'll possibly need and then the other service obviously is to get fresh water so normally if they have a toilet they'll have put in a fresh water drinking tap so it'll be a full services. And again if you use the app Park for Night you can find out exactly where these airs are you can see if they're free or if they're paid and you can see what the reviews are like you can see some photos and it's really useful to be able to get an idea what the place is like and if you want to head that way to see if you can stay there. Now if the idea of just driving to somewhere several hours away and not knowing if you are going to get a spot there is too intimidating for you which I can understand I've done it enough now that I know I'll always find somewhere but I do remember at the beginning the concept of that was so alien to us being from the UK and not really having this network that it was just daunting so if that is too daunting there is a new-ish scheme now called the camping car park scheme which I highly recommend you become a member of if you want to book spaces up in advance. With the camping car park what they have done is some of the local airs they've decided that they can't afford to keep them going they don't want to keep them going anymore but they still want them there so they've sold that land to the camping car park scheme and camping car park they've basically turned them into a network of CS and CL sites like we've got here so they're small there's always a charge on them because obviously you have to pay to book your space but you can turn up knowing that you've reserved a spot for that for the night now as far as I know you can still only say for one to three nights maximum there might be a few dotted around where perhaps they've made it longer but the idea is still that they are airs that you can keep moving around on not somewhere that you would stay for a week and have a holiday it is an overnight parking spot or a short-term spot not like a week-long resort but that's the camping car park scheme and that is really worth knowing about if you want a bit more security and if you want absolutely no security whatsoever and want the freedom to basically stay pretty much wherever you like then you will be into wild parking staying off grid all of that kind of stuff and you'll be pleased to know that Europe because they have got so much more space than the UK and also because they're a little bit more geared up and welcoming towards motor homing and campervans than we are in the UK wild parking is a lot more tolerated that does not mean that you can park up wherever the heck you like there are definitely some restrictions so obviously one of the places like national parks so places like the Dolomites in Italy it's almost impossible to wild park overnight because there are the rangers come around there are very few places that don't have no overnight parking signs on there so all in all that's one of the hardest places we've ever been that you can't stay off grid but there are places that you can stay overnight like there were some pubs or restaurants and places where you could stay in their car park and stuff so there are other alternatives and again we use park for night to find those but if you don't want to stay in a national park and you don't want to stay right on a beach front and you're happy to stay inland in perhaps like woodland areas and certainly much less crowded areas there are loads of places that you can stay now there are lots of rules that apply to wild parking but the biggest one is obviously don't leave any mess behind you don't leave any trace don't cause any nuisance and i highly recommend not getting any gear out because that then becomes camping rather than parking so don't get your awning out don't get your chairs out don't do all the camping activities stay in your van arrive late leave early the next morning and nobody will care as long as you haven't parked somewhere that's got a big no overnight parking sign on it they do notice and they will report you but that's wild parking and it is a brilliant way especially if you go somewhere like norway and sweden where i've been fairly recently and they actually have laws that allow you to go touring and staying in a huge range of locations the freedom of that is fantastic i love it it's one of my favorite things about touring around europe if you like wine visiting vineyard doing wine tours doing farmers markets shops restaurants pubs there's a chocolate farm in france there is a fantastic scheme called france passion and indeed most of the other countries across europe have also got similar schemes like the brit stops that we have in the uk and these are a collection of different companies and businesses which have signed up to let's use france passion as an example so they've signed up to france passion and they're located all around france obviously and they say well if you come and you go on a wine tasting tour or you have a meal in our restaurant or you shop at our farmers market or whatever they are if you spend money with them you can stay for free overnight in our car park very very few of them have got facilities it's basically just a car park but if you're going to go do all this stuff anyway you might as well stay for free especially if your van is set up to be off grid so you don't need electric hookup and you go at a time when you don't need water or emptying your toilet or any of that stuff then you've got a huge amount of flexibility and you can save a lot of money because the money that you would spend towards the campsite can then go towards one of these wine tasting tours or another bottle or five so that's a really good way of balancing what you're going over there to do anyway and saving some money now one thing i do want to talk about is how you stay safe when you're using airs and particularly when you're using wild park ups so there are a few things that i do when i'm choosing a place and i tend to again find these places using the park for night app i do use search for science but i tend to use search for science in the uk because search for science is british based so there's a lot of brits using it which is brilliant for the uk but for sheer volume of numbers park for night which is european has many more european people using it so you get a much bigger range of reviews and spots and everything else there's also another app that i have used before called camper contact and that's brilliant particularly if you've got a larger vehicle so i used to tour with a motorhome that was just under eight meters long with a two meter bike trailer on the back so it was about 10 meters long and when you're trying to find spots particularly airs that are long enough because most airs i would say is seven seven and a half meters um the majority of the parking spots so if you're much longer than that you probably get away with being about eight meters but any longer than that you can't so camper contact allows you to narrow down the places that are suitable for you with the length of your vehicle which is brilliant so those are the ways that i find these places and then how i pick them is based on a couple of criteria so the first thing i look for is photos if there are no photos of the spot i dismiss it immediately i don't even bother the second thing i then look for is an overall rating so i look to see how many people have stayed and if it's sort of got a consistent rating or not because something that happens quite a lot is you get people a really really good spot that has then got a no overnight parking thing on so you can look at a point at place and go oh it's got five stars that's brilliant but actually it has got 20 odd reviews where it was but the last reviews or one star saying you can't stay here anymore so i have a quick flick through the reviews and just see what they say i also look on the photos for any signs of like boy racer skid marks and all that kind of stuff and then especially if i'm going on a weekend friday night into the weekend i tend to avoid those because i don't want a load of hassle and then i also look because i'm on my laptop all the time i work from the road i do all this other stuff i look for wi-fi signal or any comments about wi-fi phone signal now i've got a starling now which does make things a little bit easier but i still tend to look just to make sure that i've got a phone signal and things especially when i'm camping on my own i don't like to stay out in the middle of nowhere without any phone signal or anything like that so that's what i look for and then when i get to a place you get a gut feeling about a place now not all of us are attuned to this and it's something that i have noticed way more the more i travel on my own is being far more attuned to my gut instincts so i listen to them and if i'm not happy with the place when i've turned up and maybe it's covered in rubbish or maybe there's some shady people there was a place in slovenia that we pulled up with and it just looked dodgy and there were some really interesting characters around and i thought i don't want to stay here so i didn't i moved on find somewhere else and that's one of the reasons i try not to arrive really really late in the evening because that way you have got time to go and find somewhere else and also when i'm looking for a spot i do have a look around to see how many other places i may not look into all of them individually but yeah i always try and look and make sure there are other options if that doesn't work out and don't forget you don't have to use air and you certainly don't have to wild park if the thought of that makes you uncomfortable go find a campsite go and find a restaurant and ask to stay in their car park there are loads of other options that you can do that don't have to make you anxious and nervous and everything else and you can slowly build up your confidence but those are the types of places that you can expect to find when you are touring in europe what we're going to cover next is the gear that you need both the legal boring stuff that you've got to have but also some of the stuff that will make your life so much easier and a few things that people think you need to carry and you really really don't so i'm going to put that out in the next video don't forget that you can download the free checklist of everything you need and i'm also doing a webinar all about touring in europe that's going to be in a couple of weeks time unless you're watching this after it's been on gun in which case you can get access to the replay but i will put all the details for that in the notes for you and you can join me on that live if you would like to right that's all for me i hope you found that useful and i'll see you on the next video take care bye