NOVEMBER 2024
You may already know that I love to travel by ferry. I find it the ideal way to travel long distances with a kid, as kids can roam around freely on large ferries. On overnight ferries you can usually book a sleeping hut, meaning you can spend a large part of your travels sleeping, which is ideal. After booking our overnight ferry from France to Ireland I heard that this crossing is really rough, so I was a bit afraid. In this blogpost you can read what our experience was like!
Stenaline Cherbourg-Rosslare
If you are traveling from the Netherlands to Ireland, you have several options. We didn’t want to drive all the way through England and have to time two ferries, so we opted for the ferry from Cherbourg to Rosslare. This crossing takes about 17 hours, covering quite a distance. The upside of this is that a large part of the ride is during the night, meaning you can sleep in your hut. We travel with a campervan and booked a 4-person hut, which costs about € 600 in August 2024. You can travel cheaper if you are traveling with a small car, there are price differences between days and seasons. We traveled on a Monday eve and had a relatively small boat (Stena Horizon). This meant that you could feel the movements of the boat more than on a bigger boat. It also meant that there was only one restaurant on deck. We had a simple meal for € 18 per person including a soft drink, which was fine. The boat seemed quite old and wasn’t very fancy, but the crossing was comfortable. We did take pills to avoid getting seasick, which worked.
Stenaline Rosslare – Cherbourg
During our return ride we traveled by Stena Vision, which was a much better and bigger boat. There were several restaurants on deck, one offered the same simple meals as Stena Horizon and one was an all-you-can-eat buffet style restaurant. We decided to go for the buffet, as it looked amazing and also offered healthy options, desserts and a cheese bar. Because Hugo was 3 he could eat for free and we paid about € 30 per person. The restaurant looks quite nice, the food was very good and it made our travel evening much more fun. The Stena Vision even has a SPA on board! The playing areas on this ship were a lot of fun, Hugo didn’t want to leave anymore. Rooms were pretty much the same as in Stena Horizon. I didn’t even take seasick pills and made the crossing without getting sick. If you have the choice I would highly advise to travel with Stena Vision, there also doesn’t seem to be much of a price difference, so you have to be lucky this boat is scheduled on your prefered travel days.
