car rentals

You probably can but you have to specifically check with the rental agency. However, you have ferry across and that is expense. Why not just rent in France?

Linda, Do you want to drive into France for a journey through France and then back to England; or do you just want to experience being in France / being on the ferry and crossing the Channel / riding on Eurotunnel under the Channel? Our advice may change a little depending on your needs.

If you are going North, that's the wrong way for France.

You can, but you probably won't. I cross-channel cars quite frequently to take advatage of the cheaper daily price of a longer-term rental, but I always take it back to the country in which I picked it up. If you do it, take the Dover-Dunkerque route rather than landing at Calais since the price is a heck of a lot cheaper, especially if you take an early-morning or late-evening departure. The offset is that the crossing is a half-hour longer. Dunkerque is a thirty-minute drive west of Calais, but the times from either port to Paris are virtually identical. You can noodle the ferry business at directferries.co.uk. Your question made my jaw drop, so I snooped around a bit. You can rent a small car for a week in the summer at Gatwick and return it there for right at two hundred bucks. Same car, same time, with a drop in France will stiff you a bit more than a grand. Same car, same time, France and France, is a tad less than three hundred dollars. Twice the price doesn't work for me. You can fiddle with car rates at kayak.com.

And you know the driver's side will be on the right side, right? Works great when you're driving on the left, but I can't imagine what that's like when driving on the right.