brian clayton

I’ve been going on mini cruises (booze cruises) to Roscoff for about 10 years now. They’re quite simple affairs. You present yourself in your car in Roslare shortly before the departure time of the boat.

You sail overnight on the boat, land at about 10:30 Saturday morning, shop till about 4, return to the boat and sail back to Ireland overnight again. I live in Cork, so this generally means leaving at 10 or 11 on a Friday and returning on a Sunday.

As you can see, there’s not a huge amount of time on shore, plenty for shopping for wine and beer (assuming no delays on approach to Roscoff) but not much for sight seeing. The Roscoff area is lovely, with nice beaches, lovely rivers and a host of small villages with fascinating architecture. There’s large towns like Morlaix to be seen too, only about 25 minutes drive from Roscoff port. We usually manage to shop till lunch time, then drive around before heading back to the boat.

This time around, we decided to upgrade to a 4 day mini cruise. This means that you leave at 18:00. on a Wednesday, arrive at 10:00 on Thursday, have all day Friday, and sail back as before at 18:00 Saturday. This gives almost 2 full days for sight seeing as well as one day for shopping. We upgraded our cabins on the boat too. Normally we’d get 2* outer cabins, but this time we upgraded to a 3* outer for the outbound leg, and a 4* outer for the return. The main difference in the 3* is a wider cabin – well worth the extra cash.

The 4* has a minibar and a telephone, but this is not worth the cash. Unless you really want to prank call your fellow passengers or something.

We decided to base ourselves in Roscoff, so we booked two nights in the Best Western in Roscoff. The hotel is modern, clean, has free wifi and a great waterfront location.

Roscoff is a tiny little town, and the hotel is located about 3 minutes walk from the main restaurant area. There’s free on street parking and the town is safe out. Dining wise, there’s great restaurants within walking distance, where you can get amazing meals:

We took one long ish drive to go see the Point du Raz.

Shopping wise, we shopped in the Geant in Morlaix and the Red Bus in Roscoff.
We saw a number of people buying for weddings, and some who were just buying a lot of wine and beer.

I kept the amount I purchased fairly small as I’ll be heading over again next May.

Money wise you can save a fortune if you’re buying high-end or in bulk.

All in all it was a great trip. I really enjoyed the extra time to plan and sight see that the 4 day mini-cruise gives you. The sailings were lovely, the new boat (the Oscar Wilde) is a real step up up from the old Normandy. We’ll do another 4 day cruise next year!

You could do this trip with kids – the boat is manageable, and the drives can be as short as you like. Roscoff itself is small, there’s a public playground and plenty of beaches nearby for the kids to go nuts. Equally, you can make it a short holiday, or just a shopping trip. You see all types on the boat.
What we don’t see as much of any more, is cars returning with the car scraping the road. I guess the recession is making people cut back. Shame, it’s fun spotting them in the carpark and wondering can they make it up the ramp onto the boat.