Word of warning autoroute A4 services
If anyone is travelling south on the A4 around Reims beware of the services Reims South (Reims- Champgne) The caravan parking is absolutely APPALLING. At best it holds 5 outfits nose to tail, 3 one side and two the other. The turns into the area are extremely tight and narrow. You can't avoid hitting and going over the kerb which is quite high. What makes it worse is that it is also full of solo cars although we did ask a French lady to move for us. Even the roads in the car park proper are very narrow.
There appears to be much more parking available on the north bound side with a very big lorry park. This can be accessed from the southbound side by going through the services and bearing off right before reaching the autoroute again. This takes you over a bridge to the north bound side. We didn't see this until we were leaving. The aire before these services is currently closed for major works. I think it is called l'Esperance.
Hope this saves someone the problems that we had yesterday.
Comments
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We are veterans of Autoroute services over 30 years and they do vary. Most frustrating is that lorries and cars will park in the shade wherever that happens to be. With the caravan we often used the lorry parking area as sometimes caravan provision is poor; although sometimes very good. The new bypass around Reims is very quiet so I am surprised that the services are so inadequate.
Much easier with our fairly compact motorhome as we can often park in car spaces.
We used to stop in an Aire after a late crossing to Calais and often found the caravan spaces taken by lorries or cars so it was common for us to end up spending the night in the lorry parking area. I have never seen any enforcement of parking areas on French Autoroutes. Perhaps they figure that having paid it would be a bit much to impose extra penalties!
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We always stop in the lorry park with the caravan on continental motorway services, nobody bothers you and the spaces are large to cope with HGVs.
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Like Landyrover, we use the HGV area unless we can actually see on entry that there is space in the caravan area as once you're in you usually can't change your mind.
Not that different to UK really although the food is usually better. On our way back to Ouistreham this week we stopped at Solanges north for steack haché and chips at Marco's frite van. Excellent!
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