Inevitably, it depends on where you go, and what you do.  We have worked our way through frame tent, trailer tent, two small caravans and, over the past five years, two motorhomes.  Each has it pros and cons, and there is no fixed answer to which is "best".  As between caravan and motorhome, for me, the main pleasure of the motorhome is speed of set-up on arrival, more or less instant pack-up and departure, and relative ease of parking en-route.  Apart from the obvious mirrored disadvantages with the caravan, were that I never "trusted" it behind the car (though both were completely stable when towing - this was just me ), the need to erect an awning to gain sufficient living space (small caravans behind small cars - another personal decision), and the fact that once sited as a base, one spent increasing amounts of time passing and re-passing the same roads as one sought interest in surrounding areas.  This was mostly rural France (because we were then both working, and so limited as to when, and for how long, we could go away).  One aspect of rural France is that it takes little time, in most areas, to pick it dry of interest, so you have to travel further and further to keep your interests fed - hence all that passing and re-passing, exacerbated in mountain regions.  Since retiring, and getting the van, we have travelled further, and for much longer, and in truth I do not think we would have contemplated the journeys we have made, if with a caravan - although I freely accept that a small band of stalwarts do.

Our van is just six metres long, but more importantly, IMO, just on two metres wide, and well under three metres high, which just about allows us to go anywhere - height barriers excepted.  We tend to plan routes, picking places to visit, and supermarkets at which to shop, along the route, so that we tour as we go.  The smaller van is quite easily manageable in car parks so very seldom restricts access.  Mostly, if we want to get into towns, we select sites on bus/train routes and travel in.  Occasionally we take the van in to visit, and return to our site of departure, but mostly once off site, we just move on.  I do not recognise the faff Clive speaks of because, having a small van, when stuff has been used it has to be put back in its regular place.  We may need to stow a few books/magazines before leaving but generally, once washed, showered, sweet smelling and breakfasted, we wind in the awning, retrieve the ramps if used (seldom), disconnect and wind in the hook-up, start the engine and go.  If table and chairs, or bikes, were out, they were stowed the evening before.  We may than travel 300, or only 20, miles to the next stop.  We travel 8 - 10 weeks at a time, spring and autumn, and visit 30 - 40 sites per trip.  We are seldom in one place longer than 5 days, usually 3, and find that small villages can easily be explored on the day of arrival - providing one arrives by around 15:00, which is why we tend not to travel more than about 300 miles.  We usually leave between 10:00 and 10:30, and stop at mid-day to eat which, in the van, is so easy.

So far we have been around Spain (Albarracin, Cadiz, Seville, Cordoba, Salamanca, Granada, Toledo, Trujillo, Merida, Caceres, Zamora, Burgos, Tordesillas, La Coruna, Santiago de Compostela, and Logrono) and Portugal (Braganca, Braga, Chaves, Porto, Viseu, Vouzela, Tomar, Coimbra, Evora, Faro, Lisbon, Beja, Serpa, and Elvas) twice, Italy (Venice, Florence, Assisi, Gubbio, Bologna, Urbino, Alberobello, Lecce, Matera, Pompei, Herculaneum, Florence, Pisa, Naples, Rome, and Siena), Slovenia (Piran, Bled, Ljubljana, Ptuj, Lendava), Hungary (Keszthely, Pecs, Kecskemet, Hortobagy, Tokaj, Eger, Budapest, Szentendre, and Estergom), the Czech Republic (Telc, Prague, Tabor, Jindrichuv Hradec, Trebon, Ceske Budejovice, Cesky Crumlov, Prachatice, and Domazlice), and Croatia (Medveja, Stoja, Rovinj, Novigrad, Krk, Trogir, Split, Dubrovnik, Starigrad, and Rab), and have crossed and re-crossed France, Austria and Germany stopping at places too numerous to list. 

All this is not to say, "been there - done that", but to illustrate the countries and regions we have been able to get to, in what seems to us a very short period of time, and just to wonder how many of these we might have got to with a caravan.  I would add that we have generally avoided motorways, in part to keep costs down, in part to alleviate the boredom of motorways, and mainly to pass through, and from time to time stop in, small towns and villages along the way, to try to get a flavour of the tempo of life in the more out of the way areas.  I don't think we could have travelled so far, with such ease, in anything other than a motorhome, and I just think the speed with one can set up, and decamp, with a motorhome has given us hours of extra free time to explore where otherwise we should have been trotting around with water and waste carriers, winding up and down steadies, parking and un-hitching, and then re-hitching, a caravan, and possibly erecting and striking an awning.  The longest trip was 4,500 miles, most being around 3,500.  From past experience, I would expect to have travelled much further (in miles per trip) with a caravan, due mainly to the amount of to-ing and fro-ing involved for almost everything we were able to do en-route.

Not a recipe for everyone, obviously, but I hope it may help the evaluation process, and may even whet the appetite for a few places that are well worth visiting, and possibly dispel some of the you can't get to........ myths that so often colour these caravan vs motorhome debates.  Of course, if one had been driving a leviathan, the perspective would shift - but not, I suspect, by that much.

At last caravan has been sold so now its time to look for another motorhome

We managed to sell the caravan and bought a new Autosleeper Nuevo II EK last September and went to France to give it a try-out and realised we had done the wrong thing in buying the caravan in hindsight we should have hired one to try before we went all hog and bought a new caravan but we only lost £1200  still a lot of money, but no doubt it could have been a lot more as they say you live and learn usually by making mistakes and life's too short to worry about it.