New to this forum, But thought I would share my experience with you all.
Reading through many forum sites over the years with references to staying overnight at French aires and the many stories of break in's and items of value stolen etc, The pro's and cons of using a aire and taking the necessary safety precautions, well lit and not isolated locations around the aire. That being said, I have been towing to the South of France with our caravan in tow since 2002 and stayed at numerous aires overnight without any concerns or fault. That was until last July 2014 where I had parked at a aire called Aire de Chateauvillain-Val -Marnay near Troyes on route down to the South. I parked up close to a couple of other caravans also there for the night and near to a 24 hr service shop and thought although a noisy location but hopefully a safe one. All the family slept well and in the morning left the caravan to enter the car and carry on with our journey, in doing so went to lock the caravan to find my lock barrel had been tampered with by probably a large screwdriver destroying the lock and then the realisation that we had had a attempted break in, not a nice thought to have I must add. We called the French police who attended within 20 mins of the call. They were quite surprised that we only had suffered an attempted break in and not actually had a theft taken place. The police spoke very good English and had stated that the theft from overnight caravans / motor homes are very common and happening across the area and this aire has had 4 reported incident is 3 days!, I asked the question, is just this aire that is high risk of theft to be informed it is happening all over France unfortunately.
On our return journey 3 weeks later we stopped at another Aire this time 100 miles short of Calais and did consider staying again but spoke to a French policeman who happened to be parked up and presented the question is this aire safe for me to stay in, to be informed NO as there has been an increase in thefts from this location, so therefore, once bitten and twice shy, we did not stay and decided to keep going and board the ferry at Calais in the early hours of the morning. It is a shame that this events happened, as I have never been one to listen to scare stories but now as it has actually happened to me, I will no longer risk staying overnight at aires and will look to book sites instead!
Cheers Pete
Reading through many forum sites over the years with references to staying overnight at French aires and the many stories of break in's and items of value stolen etc, The pro's and cons of using a aire and taking the necessary safety precautions, well lit and not isolated locations around the aire. That being said, I have been towing to the South of France with our caravan in tow since 2002 and stayed at numerous aires overnight without any concerns or fault. That was until last July 2014 where I had parked at a aire called Aire de Chateauvillain-Val -Marnay near Troyes on route down to the South. I parked up close to a couple of other caravans also there for the night and near to a 24 hr service shop and thought although a noisy location but hopefully a safe one. All the family slept well and in the morning left the caravan to enter the car and carry on with our journey, in doing so went to lock the caravan to find my lock barrel had been tampered with by probably a large screwdriver destroying the lock and then the realisation that we had had a attempted break in, not a nice thought to have I must add. We called the French police who attended within 20 mins of the call. They were quite surprised that we only had suffered an attempted break in and not actually had a theft taken place. The police spoke very good English and had stated that the theft from overnight caravans / motor homes are very common and happening across the area and this aire has had 4 reported incident is 3 days!, I asked the question, is just this aire that is high risk of theft to be informed it is happening all over France unfortunately.
On our return journey 3 weeks later we stopped at another Aire this time 100 miles short of Calais and did consider staying again but spoke to a French policeman who happened to be parked up and presented the question is this aire safe for me to stay in, to be informed NO as there has been an increase in thefts from this location, so therefore, once bitten and twice shy, we did not stay and decided to keep going and board the ferry at Calais in the early hours of the morning. It is a shame that this events happened, as I have never been one to listen to scare stories but now as it has actually happened to me, I will no longer risk staying overnight at aires and will look to book sites instead!
Cheers Pete
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