Flight prices to the Med are soaring – it’s time to re-embrace the ferry to France

In Dover, beneath the White Cliffs, a queue of cars waits to board the ferry to mainland Europe. Never mind madeleines dipped in lime blossom tea, or even the salty smell of the sea: it’s exhaust fumes, frankly – coupled with the sight of the stoical English eating their film-wrapped sandwiches next to their vehicles – that really brings back lost time.

I used to do this regularly, in childhood. We were too large a family to fly. With four kids in tow, no budget airline was ever quite cheap enough, and anyway, it was the 1980s when we started our cross-channel voyages; easyJet was yet to be invented.

Every summer, we crammed tent poles, sleeping bags, airbeds and ourselves into the car and drove hundreds of miles from Leeds to a south coast ferry terminal – the necessarily uncomfortable prelude to two weeks on a continental campsite.

It was all part of the fun, or so we were told: the long drives, the waiting, the cramped legs, then the clambering up steep steps to the deck, the heavy tang of diesel and metal in the air, calling to each other over the engine’s low thrum.

As an adult, I forgot about the ferry, with its nauseating motion and odours, its poor canteen-style food, the slowness of it all. Yet now here I am, back in the queue at Dover again, after all these years. This time with my own children, aged eight and 10. And I feel a familiar stirring inside, as the gulls screech overhead, awaiting rich pickings from the picnics.

We’re off to northern France – to Chantilly via Amiens – and I’m starting to believe this may be the best way to do it, after all. Nostalgia has long been my drug of choice, though I judge it safer to drug the children with travel sickness tablets.

The idea is to make the most of that slice of France not far from Britain, right under our noses and waiting to be explored. Almost as easy to reach as Cornwall, give or take a little sea.

With air fares to the Med reaching astronomical levels, and summer temperatures in southern Europe becoming increasingly stifling, other Britons may wish to do likewise.

The crossing with operator Det Forenede Dampskibs-Selskab (DFDS) takes 90 minutes, during which it occurs to me that the ferry is a fine way to travel: infinitely more civilised than sitting on a low-cost flight, knees pulled up under my chin.

We roll off and make it to Amiens in Picardy before nightfall, with hopes of finding a restaurant open for dinner. The reality, however, is it’s very much Sunday evening, we’re in France and the options are somewhat limited, though the boulevards seem busy with flâneurs.

“There’s an open supermarket across the road,” my husband suggests, knowing I won’t go for it. After the journey, I don’t fancy cooking in our rental apartment at the top of what feels like a thousand stairs. (The reward for the climb is a stunning cathedral view from the skylight windows.)

Instead, we perform the ritual of touring the dimly lit streets on foot, in search of the perfect brasserie, despite knowing it will certainly be closed when we stumble upon it. We devote a full hour to this quest before I accept defeat and buy from a Monoprix store a meal of instant crêpes, carrot salad and crunchy celeriac swimming in its creamy dressing.

We start the next day in a bar-tabac around the corner. “Very authentic, very typical,” I tell the children, launching into my lecture. We order coffees and sirops, play table football and disturb the old French men sitting alone in their corners.

The sirops are a form of bartering with the children: they get one sugary drink, and we get to view one breathtaking 13th-century Gothic cathedral. While we take turns to speed-tour it, they touch every last item in the gift shop. My son buys an overpriced pencil, the cost of which I hope will help fund the church’s upkeep for at least another 700 years.

We then take the tourist train, straining to hear the French audio guide while the children cheerfully talk over it. Though Amiens was heavily bombed during the Second World War, it has been rebuilt sympathetically, and is particularly pleasant along the canals, where streets of colourful waterside houses belonged to weavers, dyers, tanners and millers in the Middle Ages.

After lunch in a crêperie beside the River Somme, we proceed to Chantilly, to discover there’s far more to it than whipped cream. The motorway taking us south slices through endless flat plains, but when we leave it and head into the pretty Chantilly area, we find it bursting with fairy-tale charm.

Bumping down a cobblestone road, we pass the vast Château de Chantilly and gasp, before the road takes us into a forest. Minutes later, we swerve off and climb the short, wooded lane to the InterContinental Chantilly Château Mont Royal, a place of neo-classical elegance thickly surrounded by trees. As far as checking into a hotel goes, here it’s a lot like discovering a magical castle.

Inside, we stretch our legs after the journey, the children and my husband in the pool, me lying prone on a massage table in the spa. A fair division of parental labour, I would argue.

Dinner is an exquisite gastronomic affair, and a reminder that at least half the point of coming to France is the food. The cosy hotel restaurant, with its wood-panelled walls and theatrical-looking bar, is called Le Stradivarius, in one of several nods to the fact that the château’s original owner was the composer Fernand Halphen. He is said to have had it built in the early 20th century in order to offer his wife “an enchanting view.”

This spot remains enchanting today, and also tranquil (apart from the fact that it now contains my children). Better still we are served a superlative dinner: yellow pollack, charred leeks and wild herbs, followed by something called carrément citron, which the menu translates mysteriously as “lemon inspiration”. I am feeling inspired by the end, and incredibly full.

Following an equally sumptuous breakfast, we break the spell by heading to the nearby Parc Astérix, where tranquillity is replaced by high-octane rides and garish Gauls. A joyous day is spent soaring down chutes, careering along raised tracks and spinning on carousels. A day of more childhood pleasures – and, to the kids’ relief, no cathedrals.

But we do still have the castle to visit, the Château de Chantilly, an incredible living museum rising up from 115 acres of parkland. Designed in the French Renaissance style, it houses an impressive art collection. A morning wandering its rooms is followed by lunch in the courtyard cafe of the adjacent stables, the Grandes Écuries.

From handsome Chantilly, we drive on to its medieval neighbour Senlis, in the centre of which every street is picture-book perfect. As the light fades, we wander amid the remains of the Royal Castle, and risk the children’s ire with a peek inside the Cathédrale Notre-Dame, eerily beautiful in the gloom.

They roll their eyes, of course, and are missing the theme park. But there is, still, another sweetener at the end of the trip: the ferry ride back home. I know now it is one I will be taking again.

Rosa Silverman and her family were guests at InterContinental Chantilly Chateau Mont Royal, an IHG Hotels & Resorts property. Ferry crossings from Dover to Calais can be booked with DFDS Ferries.