September, 2023
Our first stop on our grand tour came about from another travelling family that Emily found on Instagram (@somewhereslower).
From the outside looking in, they appeared to have a fair amount of finances behind them, which, obviously we realised AFTER having booked our flights to the South of France but hey-ho, we’ve booked it now so away we go!
We tried to do things a little more on the cheaper side as we by no means have a fair amount of finances behind us so we’re going to try and stretch this trip out as long as we can.
To our surprise, you can actually do that in the South of France. It’s not cheap by any means. I do think it’s slightly come away from its notorious reputation of being incredibly pricey though.
Emily originally found flights for the 5 of us for just under £400, flying out on Thursday 14th September 2023. She found these flights on SkyScanner, flying with Ryanair which meant that it wouldn’t obviously be just under £400 because that wouldn’t include any baggage or seats or air to breathe on the flight itself so we’d be looking at something more like £600 for all 5 of us.
This leads me nicely to Travel Tip No. 1…
Travel Tip 1
If you have some flexibility when travelling, ALWAYS check the same flight on different days – by doing this, instead of paying a base rate of £400, I found flights flying on the following Wednesday (20th September 2023) for a grand total of £65…for all 5 of us!
If you have some flexibility when travelling, ALWAYS check the same flight on different days – by doing this, instead of paying a base rate of £400, I found flights flying on the following Wednesday (20th September 2023) for a grand total of £65…for all 5 of us!
Granted, that’s before the baggage, seats and air added on but with all that added, we ended up only paying just under £200. So already a saving of around £400…1-0 to me!
FLIGHT: LONDON STANSTED – NIMES
20/09/2023
13:45 – 16:45 (2 hour flight)
£197 TOTAL
BUS: NIMES AIRPORT – NIMES TRAIN STATION
€6.90 TOTAL
Kids FREE
TRAIN: NIMES – AVIGNON
€26.90 TOTAL
TAXI: AVIGNON TRAIN STATION – SAINT RÉMY
€82
ARRIVAL TIME TO ACCOMMODATION IN SAINT RÉMY
21:30
Should’ve just hired a bloody car!
Onto the accommodation…
Neither of us knew anything about Saint Rémy, where’s good to stay, where’s not good to stay so we kind of had to wing it, as we have done with every place we’ve been so far.
We booked our place on AirBnb. It cost us just over £500 for 7 nights which isn’t too bad at all considering the area. As with most places you book, the reason it was such a good price was because of the location.
It was slightly out of the town centre, the “hotspot” if you will, a 20 minute walk along a main road into the town centre.
20 minutes…that’s not too bad right? But with 3 small children, it would normally take us about 45 minutes…
“My legs are getting tired” said Forest, as we reached the end of our own drive. “Are we nearly there yet?” said Willow 4 minutes later. “Yeah nearly there, Willow!”
Meadow was loving life as she was being pushed in a buggy. Lucky bastard!
Poor Meadow and I were actually the first to discover the walk. With our late arrival time of nearly 10pm, we had no idea where we were, where anything was around us, what time things close. We ended up running through the cobbled streets of Saint Rémy desperately trying to find somewhere that served some kind of food or water as we had NOTHING.
We eventually found the lovely people at Pizza Kings (www.pizza-kings.com) that seemed to be the only remaining place open that served any kind of food and water…and wine, of course! So we grabbed some supplies and tried to make our way back to our Airbnb.
It’s funny that feeling you get whenever you go somewhere new, it’s like being on a different planet, you don’t how things work, when things close, where things are, what the people are like.
Then 3 days later, it feels like you’ve been there for months.
After 3 days of listening to the children’s despair of that walk, we decided to hire a car. The only problem with that was that most of the big hire companies that would allow us to drop the car somewhere else were all back in Avignon.
We found out that there is a bus (Bus 707) that runs from Saint Rémy to Avignon train station and for the grand total of €5 for all 5 of us to make that journey. We were away.
That journey, by the way, is the same journey that cost us €82 in a taxi going the other way.
If you decide to make the same journey from Avignon to Saint Rémy that we did, wait for Bus 707 outside Avignon Centre Train Station and it will take you right into the centre of Saint Rémy for only €5.
