Malta - British Expat Forum

Hi, we are driving to Malta from the UK and taking the Livorno ferry in July this year. The route we are taking is via Reims, Geneva, Mont Blanc, then down to Livorno, setting off on Thursday to catch the ferry on Saturday. We have 3 kids (ages 3, 11 and 13) - yes we are admittedly mad. javascript:emoticon('') Does anyone have any tips for our journey they can pass on?

There's plenty of advice/write ups about this trip elsewhere in the forum. Have a read at those.

The best advice I can give you is to stock up with food, sweets, books and a portable DVD/laptop for the Livorno ferry, especially with 3 kids. There is no shop on the boat, the food is awful and there's nothing to do for 33hrs!

Also, make sure you keep plenty of fuel in your car, never less than 1/2 a tank. Filling stations are frequent in France, less so in Italy. Sod's law also dictates that when you are hitting empty, there won't be any garages around!

Having just got back from france we had to help a Brit couple who didn't know what to put in their car, options were Gazole, 95 or 98. A newish petrol car we told them 95, ours is a diesel so gazole. To be honest I am fairly amazed they couldn't work it out as 95 and 98 are on the pumps here but some people clearly don't notice such things. The unmanned pumps worked a lot better than the ones in Malta though - what a palaver tryng to get petrol near the airport at certain times of day. Simple things like this though can be your undoing when you are about to run out and can't drive to the next one even if you knew where that was.