If you ride a motorcycle, there is a good chance you have thought about touring through Europe. It is easy to understand why. Typically, the weather in summer is good, the road surfaces are usually excellent, and the absence of traffic makes the riding all the more enjoyable.
The Picos de Europa in Spain are a popular destination, the only problem is getting there. It is 865 miles one way from Calais to Ojeda in Spain. Roughly a 15-hour ride, a lot of which is sitting on French motorways. [See French Motorway Tolls]
That is why many take the ferry to Santander, and whereas that is comfortable and convenient, you lose riding time sitting on a boat.
There are alternatives to Spain. France via the Channel Tunnel. Holland and Germany via the Stena Line Ferry to Rotterdam. But which of these would give you the most time on the bike at the destination for the lowest cost?
Armed only with a calculator and a lot of posti-notes, we let the Editor loose on the Internet and asked him to plan a succession of 10-day road trips.
The answers in the table below show the cost to get there and back, the days “lost” travelling to and from the destination, and by dividing one into the other, the cost per day at your chosen location.
Cost Per Fun Day
| Destination & Travel | Travel Days | Fun Days | Total Cost | Cost Per Fun Day |
| Spain/Brittany Ferries | 2 | 8 | £733 | £91.63 |
| Spain/Tunnel & Ride | 4 | 6 | £613+ Tolls | £102.13 |
| France/Stena Line | 0 | 10 | £260 | £26.00 |
| France/EuroTunnel | 1 | 9 | £230 | £25.56 |
| Germany/Stena Line | 2 | 8 | £435 | £54.60 |
| Germany/EuroTunnel | 3 | 7 | £405 | £58.12 |
In the sections below, we break down how we arrived at these numbers. Perhaps your preferred destination is either Wales, Scotland or Ireland. Perhaps you prefer a fly-and-ride deal.
Carle enjoys the downtime on the ferry to Spain and sees it as part of the trip. Dave is obsessed with making the most of the time available, and when Roger was bored, he rode to Shetland just because he could.
Whatever your preference, here is how we came up with the figures.
Ground Rules
Knowing how much it costs to go to Germany isn’t helpful if you want to visit Spain. Neither are we suggesting that France is better than Germany or Spain is better than both. That is for you to decide.
What we wanted to discover is which destination – be that by the train through the Channel Tunnel, ferry or riding – gives the longest time on the bike for the lowest cost.
Another consideration is where you are starting from. If you live in Ashford in Kent, then the Channel Tunnel is an obvious choice for France. Same for people in Newcastle or Harwich, the Stena Line Ferry to Holland is a simple choice.
With that in mind, we decided to start the comparison at the port where you leave England, mainly because we couldn’t come up with a fairer way of doing it.
Why Ten Days?
Ten days felt right. It takes roughly two days to get to Spain and another two to get back. Taking a week off work and going to the Picos would mean spending more time travelling there and back than enjoying Spain.
We haven’t included the cost of whatever you get up to at your destination as that is up to you. We have only looked at the journey to and from the destination.
Time on the Bike
The next challenge was factoring in time on the bike. It can be argued that time spent riding is never wasted, even if you are hanging on the throttle on the French motorways. So, the question was, do we count all the days spent riding or only those once at the destination?
We opted to count any day you were not at the destination as a travel day and was therefore subtracted from the 10-day total.
It is a harsh rule, as you can be riding the backroads towards Germany a couple of hours after arriving in Holland. But if we were to count being on trains to and from France as half a day lost, we needed to be equally mean with not actually being in Germany.
How Much?
Getting the comparison costs to balance out the prices fairly wasn’t as simple as we thought. The price of fuel keeps changing. The number of miles per gallon varies from bike to bike. Some people like 4-star hotels for their overnight stops, while others camp at the roadside.
Where cabins on ferries were compulsory, we always took the cheapest option, and the fare option selected was always the lowest available. Where the costs for overnight stops were hidden in the ferry ticket price, we made the night stop cost zero.
Some ferries include an evening meal. Others charge excessively for half a cup of coffee. After trying several different methods to calculate it, we gave up and ignored the food costs.
Following numerous mugs of tea, we finally settled on the following parameters.
A maximum distance of 400 miles per day. Petrol costs we set at a woefully optimistic £1.80 per litre and decided that our imaginary motorcycle did 50 miles per gallon. Finally, a bed for the night costs £50 per night.
Calculations
And the possible variations in cost didn’t end there. The ferry to Spain, for example, goes up by £200 if you want the summer months. According to Brittany Ferries, May isn’t the summer and is therefore cheaper.
The next consideration was that the Stena Line ferry to Holland is overnight. You wake up in Holland with your bike and are ready to go at 8am. Same on the way home, you arrive for the night crossing back to the UK on the evening of the 10th day. For maximum time on the bike, this is the best option.
The EuroTunnel (Le Shuttle) is efficient but you have to spend time messing about with trains as part of the first and last days. It is minimal but still a factor, so we docked one day overall from the trips using the Channel Tunnel for standing about waiting for trains.
Conclusions
You can see in the table at the top of this article the results of us adding together the costs and dividing them by the number of days at the destination after all the travel is done.
If you wish to examine the costs more precisely, click here for a copy of the calculations.
Perhaps not surprisingly, France, through the Channel Tunnel, is the lowest cost option for European touring, remembering that we haven’t factored in the trip to Dover.
France via Stena Line ferries to Holland comes a crushingly close second in terms of value for money, assuming Harwich is an easy departure point for you to reach.
Germany cements a solid second place in terms of cost per enjoyable day and offers some fantastic roads, even if it offers less “throttle freedom” than Spain.
The surprise for us was the cost per enjoyable (fun) day just getting to Spain brings. On a ten-day trip, you only get either six or eight days enjoying yourself, and the cost per day of the travel is roughly double the cost of visiting Germany and treble that of visiting France.
Yet the Picos remains the first choice for most motorcyclists looking for a European Tour. Strange.
