London to Romania by Car

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Yes, you can drive from the UK to Romania by car. It’s very easy to just drive onto a ferry from the UK and cross to France, or you can take the tunnel. Every year we drove from London to Romania and back. It’s a long drive, around 1,500 Km if you take the shortest route.

Sometimes we just get in the car and do it the quickest way possible, other years we turn it into more of a road trip, adding kilometers, days and cost, to make this road trip a more fun experience.

London England To Romania Drive Time

You could make the drive in a 3 or 4-day marathon but we generally take at least a week to 10 days over the trip.

Sometimes we increased that time to 2 weeks to fit in some new countries, sites and experiences.

How long it takes to drive from London to Romania depends on your needs and wants as well as your budget.

Are you in a hurry, or do you have time to enjoy? Do you have cash to spend or do you want to do it in the cheapest way possible?

The biggest cost in driving to Romania from the UK is your hotel stays, usually. So reducing the number of nights you spend in hotels and driving longer each day should make your trip cheaper.

 Driving from London England to Romania

London to Romania Distance

The distance from central London to central Bucharest is 1,478 miles or 2378 Km, by road, if you take the most direct route, according to Google maps.

Bucharest is a long way from the Romanian border, so the distance from London to the Romanian Border is in the region of 583 KM. That’s the distance from Bucharest to Oradea, which is close to the border with Hungary.

The distance from London to Romania’s western border is therefore about 1800 km or 1118 miles.

There are multiple border crossings from Hungary into Romania and which you choose will depend on your destination in Romanaia.

To drive to northern Romania we would head to north east Hungary and cross near Satu Mare for Baia Mare.

London To Romania Flight

Romania has multiple airports, and so does London. A flight to Romania from London takes about 3 hours and costs maybe 100 UK pounds or $120 US.

You should be able to find cheaper flights if you use Skyscanner and stay flexible.

It is undoubtedly cheaper and quicker to fly London-Romania than to drive.

But we didn’t always have that option.

We normally flew from London Luton or Stanstead to Romania on Wizz Air, when we didn’t have to drive.

England is great and so is travel in Romania, but there are some cool places to stop in between. We have a full Europe Travel Blog page and directory if you’re looking for more information.

Places to Visit on the London to Romania Road Route

We have visited, stayed in and/or posted about the following destinations on this epic trans-Europe drive.

Northern Route

Southern Route

We are in the process of updating this post, I will add maps and more information in the next week, at the moment we are driving from Romania to England taking a relaxed, southern route.

Where to Sleep on The Drive?

An AirBnb in Slovenua, enjoying our Europe Road Trip
This Airbnb apartment in Slovenia gave us a low cost, beautiful apartment in a winery, with free wine. We like to enjoy our road trips!

Airbnb in Europe can be a good deal if you can find places to stay without huge extra cleaning charges. Pick quirky, interesting accommodation, luxury or low-cost. You’ll find it all.

We also use family budget hotel chains and any lower cost hotels.

Sometimes we use hostels with family rooms, for instance we did this in Prague.

Important Considerations for The UK- Romania Drive

  • Ferry or Tunnel?
  • Road Tolls and Vignettes
  • Fuel Cost Variations
  • Having Your Car Legal for Driving in Europe and the UK
  • Car Seats and Safety for Small Children
  • Finding Accommodation

All of these factors will be addressed in posts over the next few weeks.

England to Romania (and back) with Kids in the Car

The kids loved driving across Europe the first time, but maybe for the wrong reason.

They loved being able to say they’d been to 25 countries, now they can say it’s 29, maybe 30, we need to sit down, colour some maps and count.

For me, well, Europe is my “normal”.  You’ll notice that the World Travel Family travel blog is mostly about Asia, that part of the world is closest to our hearts.

I truly feel like myself in Asia, I don’t fit right in Europe.

All the same, I’ve seen some new places, had adventures and I’m pretty pleased with myself for pulling off such a mammoth road trip.

As always, I’ll tell it like it is. Travel isn’t all wonderful, sometimes it sucks, just as normal life can have sucky moments.

As we’ve driven this route more and more the novelty has worn off and 8 hour driving days lead to hot, fed-up kids.

We try to break the journey up in places that will interest them and provide plenty of ice cream to keep the peace.

Why London to Romania by Car?

We have to get our car, she’s called Sexy after the TARDIS, from London to our current home base in Romania and back.

Flying is cheaper by a very long way, but our car has to get from England to Romania, by road, annually.

We need a 4×4 in Romania, something to cope with dirt tracks and snow, we also need a tray-back to transport heavy goods and building materials, so that’s what we use.

She’s beautiful and we love her. She mostly drives well crossing Europe on autobahns and motorways but one year she broke down time after time in the summer heat.

Make sure your vehicle is performing well before setting off on a journey like this.

Our London to Romania Route

One year we took the route below, ferry to France, drive through Belgium, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary before entering Romania.

We’ve varied the route, but this is the cheapest and quickest, with fewest road tolls.

The southern route through Europe to Romania, through Hungary, Slovenia, Italy and France before taking the ferry to the UK cost a lot more in road tolls. More details to follow.

Day 1 London to Brussels 1 night

 A taste of Brussels, waffles, chocolate, beer, Tin Tin, the Mannekin Pis and the Atomium. Brussels.
A taste of Belgium, waffles, chocolate, beer, Tin Tin, the Mannekin Pis and the Atomium. Brussels. Brugges is a little out of the way if you’re taking the quickest, most direct route, but Brussels makes a good stop.

We left late, 5pm. Sexy was in the garage and the mechanics were working on that starting problem. They replaced a gizmo, a thingum and a wotsit belt, but the problem persisted.

Two days of tinkering for no improvement at all. Oh well.

It was a great relief to finally be on the road, all be it at 5pm in rush hour traffic. Chef took the wheel for the drive to Dover.

Crossing the Channel on the ferry was a breeze, we hadn’t booked, we just turned up, got in line, bought a ticket and drove straight on. A comfortable hour and a half later and very reasonably priced dinner inside us, we were in Calais.

” Yay we’re in France!”. Then all but the driver fell asleep.

We arrived at our Brussels hotel at 1 am and went straight to bed.

Day 2 Brussels to Frankfurt. 2 nights.

We had a few hours to check out Brussels, edited highlights to give the kids a taste of this little country.

Chef and I  normally head to Bruges for a few days of fruit beer, chocolate, moules and frites, but on this morning we were on a mission to find waffles.

Parking near the Manneken Pis, we explored the streets, checked out the street art and a few touristy shops, had our breakfast treat and piled back into the car.

A lovely-looking park full of autumn colour spoke to the kids as we drove towards the Atomium.

Time for a run around and a game of hide and seek with dad before heading on to Germany.

We had breakfast in Belgium and lunch on the Rhine before arriving at our Frankfurt hotel for 7.10pm.

This was, if not the worst hotel experience of my life (we had a stinker in Penang) certainly the second worst.

It’s a long story and one I will tell one day, the owner was a pig of a man, that’s all I’ll say for now.

We spent the next day exploring Frankfurt, a city that, at first, impressed us not at all.

It was dirty, looked and smelled like a public toilet and seemed populated by drug addicts and derelics.

Nothing was open because of the Berlin Wall anniversary celebrations, so we found breakfast in a revolting station Mc Donalds.

Here we discovered that 200 Euro notes are accepted “Nowhere in Germany”. Not very convenient.

In the afternoon we managed to find the nicer part of Frankfurt, away from the red light district.

Berlin Wall celebrations were in full swing, boy bands in lederhosen took to the stages and small crowds gathered.

We found the pretty old town and sampled curry wurst and toffee apples. A stein of beer raised our Frankfurt-weiry spirits.

At 3am, Chef left for his flight back to London, the airport is around 80 Km out of Frankfurt. Also not very convenient, there was a bus.

Day 4 Frankfurt to Prague 3 nights

 London to Romania by car. One of the highlights of Prague on our child-focussed city tour. Art at the Lennon wall as a busker played Imagine.
One of the highlights of Prague on our child-focused city tour. Art at the Lennon wall as a busker played Imagine. Prague is a cheap place to stay and a lovely city to visit, but other parts of the Czech Republic offer good, cheap, places to break your drive.

From here on in, it was just me and the boys. I was excited to start driving but nervous about navigating. I suffer from anxiety quite badly, so getting lost is a fear that haunts me.

That’s exactly what we did.

For some reason the GPS failed. I needed to resort to the map and the route I’d planned out on paper the night before.

The tiny print was too small for my ageing eyes, switching between driving in sun glasses and map searching in reading glasses was a struggle.

I think we took around 2 hours just to get out of Frankfurt.

D helped as best he could, he’d previously not even seen the road map, but he had a go.

From that point on, I planned routes and showed him maps every night, just in case.

As we approached Prague, some 500 Km later, my anxiety was maxing out again, how on earth was I going to navigate busy city streets to find our hotel?

At that point, incredibly, I heard a voice from under the map, Dave (as the GPS is now known) had come to life just at the right millisecond and he totally saved us.

There is no way I would ever have found our hotel without him.

A nice hotel full of character and with friendly helpful staff. A much better result.

We had 2 full days in Prague, it’s a remarkably beautiful city and this was our first visit.

I struggled with the tram tickets, then I struggled with finding the right tram, but once those difficulties were overcome and my mental peace restored, we had a great two days.

You can read about the brilliant Prague for kids tour we took with Travelove by clicking the link.

Day 7 Prague to Brno  (Czech Republic)

After our experiences driving in and around Frankfurt and Prague, I didn’t want to visit more big cities.

We picked Brno, in the south of the Czech Republic as being a cheaper place to stay than Austria.

It was purely an overnight rest stop, we saw nothing of the town other than its Tesco megastore.

Day 8 Brno to Gyor (Hungary)

 One of very few restaurant meals we ate on our trip. We couldn't visit Hungary without having a bowl of goulash.
One of very few restaurant meals we ate on our trip. We couldn’t visit Hungary without having a bowl of goulash and Hungary is squarely on the London to Romania by car route.

Dave the GPS got us safely through Austria and into Hungary in not much more than 3 hours.

Gyor isn’t far from the Austrian border, a reasonably large town, not far from the motorway, with a nice looking hotel. Those three criteria picked this stop for us.

Our hotel here was beautiful, still around 50 Euros, as all our other hotels were, but way superior in just about every way.

I’ll post about that hotel and this cute, picturesque town, soon. We enjoyed Györ very much, our first taste of Hungary.

Day 9 Gyor to Maramures County, Romania.

We had planned to visit Budapest, maybe stay overnight there, but on that morning, we all just wanted to be home in our little house in Romania.

We had friends and a bunny calling us, so we decided to go for gold and drive straight through.

We left around 8.30am and arrived at 5.30pm, in time to go to the village pub, with just a half hour stop for fuel and refreshments.

How Was The Romania Road Trip?

We enjoyed most of the journey. The boys were angelic by anybody’s standards, they read book after book and each night I loaded up their Kindles with more reading material.

They read and slept in the back snuggled in blankets, they counted buzzards and sometimes we chatted. A big, solid 4×4 removes any worry of car sickness, they were fine.

I asked Boo yesterday if he thought he’d learned anything by driving across Europe.

“Yes,” he said, “they’re crazy about solar power.”

They are, crossing Europe we saw field after field of solar panels and wind generators, it’s impressive to see and prompted much discussion about renewable energy.

We saw no evidence of the refugee crisis, I expected to see people, maybe have trouble at borders, there was nothing.

We paid no tolls other than the standard fee for driving in Hungary. Surprising, as I’d read so much about the high cost of driving major European roads.

We crossed from country to country without even stopping, the only border we showed our passports at was that into Romania, it’s not one of the Schengen countries. Our vehicle wasn’t searched, which took me by surprise, we could easily have had a few extra people hiding in the back.

This was our first time travelling carry-on only.

We flew to London with just my laptop bag and the boys’ small backpacks. Clothes weren’t a problem, I washed things as we went. Toothbrushes and toothpaste were our only wash-kit, I bought a solid shampoo bar in London for the return trip. We took just one laptop, we normally have 3, we didn’t miss the others. We made no attempt to do “school” during this trip, natural learning only.

Home now, to peace, quiet and just living normally. It was great to visit London, as always, and seeing a bit more of Europe was an interesting experience, but now we rest and plot our next adventure, I need to update that post on how many countries we’ve visited, too. It’s good to be home.

We don’t post about Europe too often, other than London and Romania, our home bases. If you’re looking for more information on travel in Romania we have a full guide to Romania travel and  \destinations here on our Romania Travel Blog page. Maybe take a look at our village in Romania, Breb. You’ll see why we love it so much. Alternatively there is a great guide to your Eurotrip to help you with planning, click through to a site that will help you with just that.  

Note: We did this drive, London to Romania and back, every year using different routes. It is covered in various ways elsewhere on our site.

If you'd like to hire a car during your stay, use this car rental comparison tool to find the best deal!

We also suggest you take a look at this company to get a quote for all kinds of the more tricky adventure or extended travel insurance.

Try Stayz / VRBO for an alternative way to find rentals on homes/apartments/condos in any country!

About the author
Alyson Long
Alyson Long is a British medical scientist who jumped ship to chase dreams. A former Chief Biomedical Scientist at London's West Middlesex Hospital she started in website creation and travel writing in 2011. Alyson is a full-time blogger and travel writer, a published author, and owns several websites. World Travel Family is the biggest. A lifetime of wanderlust and over 6 years of full-time travel, plus a separate 12 month gap year, has given Alyson and the family some travel expert smarts to share with you on this world travel site. Today Alyson still travels extensively to update this site and continue her mission to visit every country, but she's often at home on her farm in Australia.

16 thoughts on “London to Romania by Car”

  1. This is an amazing blog inspire me more to travel in UK. I have open an youtube channel only for travelling.

    Reply
  2. I travel from Bolton to Afumati (18km from Bucharest. It is about 1800 miles. I sleep in the car with dog. Usually have to get there fast, but slowly on return. I was in Afumati just a little less than 3 months in 2016. I think was my 20th trip there.. Up to 2007 I mostly flew, but since have driven. Gives a bit more leeway and freedom. I used to stay in an hotel, but now I stay with friends. Last time I was over, I was given a dog, second from the same person as it happens. Was invited to a gypsy wedding, been to a few christenings there and a couple of Easters. One was done in Latin at the monestry at Sinia and then to the pallace. Been trough with English guild and a Romania guide. Both were great experiences. Regarding the acutal journey, it was fast and great country, but I took short route. France, Belgium. Holland, Germany, Austria, bit of Slovakia, Hungary then Romania. It has changed a lot since first time with the roads. Timisoarna to Criaova was terrible, but now it is fine. the roads are so much better than 2003 on first visit. Now with EU funding, the roads are great. Rail from Cluj to Buch, takes ages, but a high speed link is planned. But since I have a car there, I rarely use trains or trams etc. Just a lovely country all over. The older ones may not know English, but all under 25 seem too. Only last night a friend asked when I was next over. And today I see this blog. Odd as I was looking for tuica LOL

    Reply
  3. Hi Alyson,

    Your blog is amazingly detail and wonderful to read.

    I would like to ask your opinion, I’m studying medicine in Romania and I would like to get a car from Germany and drive back. I would like to get your advise on the route to Romania.

    Many thanks in advance and Happy New Year.

    Reply
    • We normally go straight across the bottom of Germany then either quickly pass through Austria or Czech Republic and Slovakia before dropping into Hungary. You need to be very careful to get the right vignettes and permits though. We got caught once in Hungary and once in Slovakia. The Slovakian cops let us off but in Hungary we paid a fine even though we’d already paid for a vignette. We just didn’t buy it fast enough. Going through Austria the traffic was terrible the time I did it that way.

      Reply
      • Hi, we’re driving to Romania from the UK in August and don’t want to get caught out with anything, If we’re going to take the quickest route you mentioned what road tolls & vignettes would we need to pay for/buy?

        Love the blog

        Matt

        Reply
        • Hungary! Also we got stopped once in Slovakia but they let us off. You can use toll – free roads if you use an app to find them. Otherwise there weren’t many. I think you’re supposed to to go accross that corner of Austraia, but I didn’t first time and never went that way again because the traffic was terrible. But right accross Germany I think we were OK. Can’t really remember sorry Matt.

          Reply
          • Thanks for getting back to me, I see you can purchase vignettes online now days, how do they work, do you still have any kind of physical sticker at all or is your car just recorded on a computer and police and people know you’ve paid it? We’ve got the drive coming up soon so want to make sure I’m really prepared. Are there many tolls across this northern route also?

            Kind regards

            Matt

            Reply
            • I know you can do Hungary online. But you can also just pay at the booths inside the border. The reason I didn’t pay, and got fined, was not all traffic has to go through the booths, you just pull over voluntarily and I didn’t know what they were – it’s all in Hungarian. The next day I bought one at a petrol station, but too late, their cameras had already picked me up and issued the fine. Sorry, I don’t know any more really. Czech Republic there were booths, likewise Slovakia, Slovenia. Romania you can get them at fuel stations, not sure if there are booths at the border, you will need all your car documents, including insurance. It’s not all roads though, small roads you often don’t need them. Western Europe it tends to be toll roads more. Austria – no idea, we drove through no problem.

              Reply
  4. Hi, what a lovely adventure. We are planning to take a road trip to Romania with both our kids this Christmas. Me and my husband have done many road trips to Europe, this will be our first with the LO. So,fingers crossed, everything will be okay. Already packed lots of snacks, some new books and toys to keep them busy. Any other tips,will be much appreciated. Also, would you be able to advice which is the shortest/quickest route Calais-Romania?

    Reply
    • France, Belgium, Germany then either Czech Rep or cut through Austria into Hungary. We’d then go north end enter Romania in Maramures. It’s one heck of a drive but we have a friend who’s done it in one go, solo. We normally do it in 4+ days. Sometimes much longer. But that’s about the shortest time we’ve ever done it in. It’s pretty dull until you get past Budapest, all motorways, nothing to see. It’s nicer if you can get off those big roads. There’s plenty of snow in our part of Romania now, but they’re very good at keeping the roads cleared. Take your woolies!! New Years Eve is when we get the temperatures down to minus 20 usually. And we’re always outside with champagne turned to slush!

      Reply
  5. So glad I found this.. My partner is Romanian so tonight we are travelling to Romania so lovely to the different routes.xx

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  6. Wow – what an adventure. I am looking forward to more Romanian stories though.
    Well done for rising above all the challenges. You all amaze me. xox

    Reply
  7. I love your adventures. As a mom of 4 who have traveled mostly in the states you realize there is always going to be kinks in the best laid plans.

    Reply
  8. Welcome home to all of you. So nice to hear you are happy to get to your own space! I must google-up “solid shampoo bars” … never heard of it! Enjoy home! When is Chef coming back?

    Reply
    • Lush Talitha, a British company. They have shops in Australia, should do in Europe. They smell amazing and are great on my hair. I use Karma, I always used to use that perfume too, but I haven’t worn perfume since I had the kids.

      Reply

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