We have done this trip several times now and definitely can vouch for the fact that it does save time and money. Even though Northern Ireland is in the United Kingdom you can find that flying to France usually means two flights unless of course you are heading straight for Paris and in that case you’ve only got the one flight.

When we were travelling to the south of France we needed to do the trip by car and so looked up all the ferries to france and the offers available. Ferry-to-France do very reasonably priced crossings offering a choice of departure/destination points with different ferries but our first trip there was done taking the Belfast-Stranraer-Dover-Calais route. We did it in 14 hours (the Belfast to Dover leg that is…) and it almost killed us! then there was the two day trip from Calais to our destination in Perpignan…

We wanted to do the car-ferry thing again and decided on the Belfast-Rosslare-Le Havre route and found that this suited us to a tee. It was a four hour trip to Rosslare, onto the ferry and an overnight sailing – we booked a 4 berth cabin and found it to be very comfortable indeed, we found that sleeping through a night time sailing made the trip go that much faster. Once we arrived we broke the drive from Le Havre down to Perpignan into two days quite easily and that suited us so that we weren’t too fatigued from driving. If you are in NI and want to go to France by car then definitely consider this option.