France

France is interesting in that it has such a huge number of rock-climbing sites, but the actual information is often quite scattered and localised. The Crag or the UKC websites are useful for identifying climbing areas and route-lists. Sometimes that’s enough as many areas have route-names and even grades labelled. Often it would be really useful to have a bit more context, the availability of guidebooks varies hugely and often the best source is through other climbers/locals instead. I’ve shared my sources on a per crag basis.

Roads are all good. Motorway tolls can really rack up in expenses.

Camping

• park4night was (as always) our go-to resource with plenty of options: from scenic tucked away nature spots to convenient park-ups near towns.
• You don’t need to rely on campsites for services – many motorway service stations offer toilet dump points and fresh water. How well they work is variable so the comments in park5night is very useful. Extremely convenient for services but never stay overnight – they seem to be very much the hotspot for thieves who then make a quick motorway getaway.

As mentioned in the intro, our visit to France followed quite a specific route and we were moving quite quickly.

On the way out from the UK it was the height of summer: we entered from Luxembourg, passed near Lyon, stayed briefly in Chamonix (with very little climbing on account of the focus being instead on crazy mountain running i.e. the UTMB) and left to Italy near Turin (on account of the Mont-Blanc tunnel surprising us with being shut). On the wintery return we re-entered from Italy near Monaco and made a stop in the beautiful Calanques before blasting back to the UK.

We made opportunistic stops at crags available and in every location there was always an alternative attraction of culture, cuisine, history etc. These were as diverse as the crags we sampled so take a look on each of the individual pages for what we got up to and would recommend.