Thoughts & Tips on Travelling Around the Swiss Alps in a Camper Van

How did I plan my trip? What were my highlights? Plus my general advice for travelling by camper van.

Last month, I spent seven days travelling around the Swiss Alps in a camper van with my boyfriend. We navigated winding roads up mountains, slept so close to lakes that we could hear the water lapping against the shore as we lay in bed, and spent our days exploring the beautiful landscapes that surrounded us.

As I’ve been sharing stories from our trip on my Instagram and after briefly recapping our journey on last month’s Field Notes musings, I’ve had quite a few people reaching out to me with questions. How did I plan my trip? Was Switzerland outrageously expensive? What were the highlights and lowlights? Do I have any general tips or advice for staying in a camper van? I’m going to try to answer everything in below, but if you have any further questions, please feel free to leave me a comment or send a DM.

Just a note for transparency that we did not pay for the camper van hire. We were in Switzerland shooting for Road Surfer, a company who hire out campers all across Europe, the UK and America. We paid in full for our flights, campsites, petrol, food & drink, and all other expenses during this trip. It’s a funny one that crosses the boundaries between organic content, my freelance work and technically an ‘ad/pr stay’. I have not been paid or asked to write this article or share anything about the trip on my Instagram or blog.

How did I plan my trip?

I genuinely love planning my travels. I sometimes wonder if I even prefer the planning to the holidays themselves. Subsequently, I had loosely planned out a similar journey before I even began talking to Road Surfer. I’d known for years that I would love to explore the Swiss Alps either by train or camper van.

Once the work with Road Surfer had been locked in, I had to choose where I wanted to pick up and drop off the van. This had to be the same place, and after going back and forth between Bern and Milan, I decided upon Bern for several reasons, but mainly because I wanted to focus the majority of this trip in the Swiss Alps. We did originally plan to travel down through the Italian cantons of Switzerland and visit one or two Italian lakes, but as I’ll explain shortly, extreme weather forecasts meant we had to change our plans.

I didn’t want to plan too much, to allow us to wake up each morning and decide where to go next - as is the beauty of travelling in the vehicle you are also sleeping in. We planned our first campsite in advance, but didn’t book any campsites, adapting our plan as the week went on, dependent on what we were enjoying and what the weather forecast was saying. When news of huge storms reached us, this flexibility allowed us to completely change our direction - rather than risking driving through high mountain passes right into the worst of the storm, we headed further east and stayed in Switzerland.

Although I didn’t plan an exact route or book any campsites in advance, I did spend some time looking at Google Maps before our trip, saving places we might like to visit and potential campsites to stay on. I also planned a loose route with two options - a loop and an option where we would drive back the same way. As I mentioned, we ended up completely changing our plan, but we still stuck to the first couple of days of the original route which helped us to then decide where to head next.