Crossing Channel England to Brittany, France

Depends on how you will be travelling around Brittany. Brittany really needs a car to tour it, and the French ferry ports in Brittany are not well connected by rail. So the best choice is to pick up a hire car at the ferry port in France.

Ferry routes to Brittany (and nearby Normandy are):

• Portsmouth - Cherbourg (MyFerryLink)
• Portsmouth - Le Havre (DFDS Seaways)
• Portsmouth - Caen (Brittany Ferries)
• Portsmouth - St Malo (Brittany Ferries)
• Poole - Cherbourg (Brittany Ferries)
• Poole - St Malo (Brittany Ferries)
• Weymouth - St Malo (Condor Ferries)
• Plymouth - Roscoff (Brittany Ferries)

Details from the booking site: www.aferry.com/cross-channel-ferries.htm or you can look up the websites of the ferry companies directly. All the above English ports (Portsmouth, Poole, Weymouth, Plymouth) can be reached by train from London, plus a taxi to the port. Plymouth is a lot longer journey from London than the other 3.

You might also want to check how much more expensive it would be to rent in one country and return in another. (Not to mention the steering-wheel position ... ) You do have open-jaw plane tickets, don't you? Some ferries might not take pedestrians, be sure to check. Also watch the travel time-many of the ferries are quite slow, boring, and rough-seas.

I personally think that ferries for this trip are obsolete, but since I get seasick easily, I'm not impartial. The Eurostar train stops at Lille, which isn't that convenient for you, but there may be other options. It is really fast, and really cheap if bought (non-changeable) months in advance. Also, Kings Cross/St. Pancras Station is really easy to get to. If you don't have much luggage, you could consider a "bargain airline". We combined the Chelsea (London) Flower Show with Naples, Italy last summer that way, a much longer trip. As you may know, low-fare airlines have their own annoyances.

Flybe has direct, summer weekend flights from London Southend Airport to Rennes. Check more airport options in Brittany at www.skyscanner.com. Otherwise, the ferry plus picking up rental car on the French side is the most direct option, but not necessarily much cheaper than an advance-discount Eurostar ticket to Calais, Lille, or Paris.

We landed at Heathrow and had a car from www.aquacars.co.uk, based in Portsmouth, fetch us and take us to our overnight stay in Portsmouth. We used Brittany Ferries the next day, Portsmouth to Quistreham, which is the actual French port, and took the waiting bus to the Caen railroad station. We secured our pre-reserved car right across the street from the Caen railroad station and followed our GPS to Bayeux, about 15 miles or so. The ferry is a 6 hour trip but we opted for it since we'd never done a ferry trip. To save time and a travel day or two, take the Eurostar to Lille or Paris, pick up a rental car in Paris and drive to your destination. You might even stop overnight in Bayeux, then have a delightful drive to Brittany, about 3 hours or so. We have also taken a train from Paris to Caen, about 2 hours, and got our rental car, again right across the street from the Caen RR station, and driven to Cancale. You have lots of choices depending on your travel time and budget, but a car really is needed to explore Brittany.

Do they still run the giant hovercraft ferries across the Channel? I went out of my way to try that once (on a trip where I had plenty of time) and that was a hoot. Not terribly efficient time-wise, but a pretty unique means of getting somewhere!

No, although they do still operate between Ryde (Isle of Wight) and Southsea.

David, the hovercrafts stopped when the Channel Tunnel opened, they couldn't compete. On the Dover-Calais run the ferries are the cheap end of the market, and the Tunnel is the fast route, which costs more.

On some of the longer routes (English South Coast to Normandy and Brittany, and East Coast to the Netherlands) they have catamarans which are advertised as "fast ferries"

Re: the fast ferries... Annoyingly (because it's a route I use a lot as I've family in NL and driving up from Calais is an expensive PITA) the cat got taken off of the Harwich-HoH route years ago so it's an 8-9 hour crossing not 3 hours. I've had my say (read: rant) about that elsewhere...