And for those of us blessed with three children or more, the word “August” always comes with the “ker-ching!” of a cash register. Ferry prices rocket, air fares go sky high, and the realisation dawns that your hot and sticky ingrates have to be transported to a foreign shore where you, the loving parent, have to cook, clean, and shop in an unknown supermarket that definitely doesn’t stock Marmite.
Having talked to dozens of mothers on Mumsnet.com, recurrent themes emerge. The self-catering villa versus all- inclusive hotel question is a favourite, as mothers either want control over the food or are sick of the sight of a saucepan.
“I wanted someone else doing all the cooking,” says Victoria Benson, 35, from North London, who recommends a Mark Warner holiday (0870 7704227, www.markwarner.co.uk; from £3,430 for a family of five, at Palm Beach Resort, Turkey). Although her four children, aged 1 to 6, were reluctant to attend kids’ clubs, she says: “I don’t like going to cottages — it rained on both of our holidays in Wiltshire — or transferring the drudgery abroad with villas.”
Other unexpected truths were that if I replied, “Gosh, how exciting!" to any parents’ description of a recent holiday, they always sheepishly admitted that they had, in fact, left the children at home. The Continent is the favourite destination for cash-strapped parents, and long-haul trips are undertaken only if grandparents have offered to toss the toddlers into the back of the car on arrival.
Big families on a budget strap Thule boxes on to their estate cars and head for the British seaside or France. Only dedicated net surfers can deviate from these options, booking one-off accommodation direct and finding their own flights (“taking the children out of school either side of Easter, we found outbound tickets for £6 each to Spain and £60 return. We spent about three hours researching online,” said one Mumsnetter).
When it comes to value for money, you can’t beat camping. Alison Berry, 35, from Egham, who runs the online Ideal Present company for children under 10, is evangelical about how camping has changed since she was a child. “Last year we had a fixed three-bedroom tent, equipped with beds and a fridge, when we went to La Vendée for a week” (0870 3338338, www.eurocamp.co.uk; from £691 at Jard sur Mer, including return Dover-Calais ferry crossing).
“If I go to a cottage, everything feels difficult,” she says, “but in a tent you don’t have any expectations. Whether you are sleeping in sleeping bags or cooking on Calor gas, it’s an adventure.” Berry’s three children (aged, 5, 3 and 6 months) wore wristbands with contact details, but with only other families around the site, “it felt a safe environment”, she says.
For those with tiny children given to squealing and having tantrums on planes, driving can be a better option. Portable DVD players (Halfords, from £49.99) have made endless games of I Spy and tuneless encores of Row, Row, Row the Boat a thing of the past. When Nicky, 32, from Guernsey took her three children (aged 2, 3 and 5) away in the summer last year, they drove to the South of France.
“We got on a ferry to St Malo and drove down from there. We plugged the children into Disney films on the portable DVD using two headphones with the other watching without sound. The drive down was 12 hours with a stop for lunch. It worked well,” she says. The family rented a villa with a pool and electric gates from a friend, and spent their time “in the children’s routine. We put them to bed at 7.30pm and then cracked open a bottle of wine. We enjoyed pottering around in little villages and looking at galleries.”
Good planning is needed with the traditional pool-villa combo and small children, however. Jo Pinkess, 41, went to Provence with two other families, her husband and four children, and described it as “one of the worst holidays I can remember. We got there to find no fence around the pool, and although I had bought gates to keep the twins in a room, there were no doors to attach them to.” Pinkess resigned herself to watching her two-year-old twins, Emily and Caitlin, all day.
“It felt as if the only break I had was when I went to bed.” Pools in France now must be fenced or have other security measures to protect children.
