The Gallery: Travel - and why travelling with kids doesn’t have to be hard work

Tara Cain at Sticky Fingers has given us Travel as the category for this week's Gallery.  I decided that this would be a good opportunity to tell you about one of the MOST successful experiences we've had travelling with our children. Couldn't limit it to one pic though.
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Our family holidays have largely fallen into two categories – travelling abroad to stay with far flung family or going somewhere that offers an all inclusive meal plan plus kids club so that my husband and I get a break from the 24/7 job of being a parent.

However, this Easter, we decided to go to a self-catering gîte in the French countryside. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t classify being in the countryside, cooking, cleaning and looking after children a holiday. It too closely resembles my everyday life.

But I really wanted to explore a bit more of France and figured that we’d probably have better weather there than at home and as long as it wasn’t hugely expensive, we could still have a ‘proper’ holiday in the summer holidays.

I have worked with child friendly holiday family specialists Tots to Travel for five years, but have yet to go on one of their holidays. But this year I decided it was high time I sampled what I'd been promoting for years (please note, I paid for this holiday, it wasn't a freebie so I'm reviewing this as a real customer).

After browsing the website, I found the perfect spot in Belle Gites, a cluster of five family friendly gîtes in Charente Maritime, where there would be other children to keep my two sons (7 and 5) entertained. And it offered home cooked meals, was near places I wanted to visit and was very affordable.

The courtyard at Belle Gites

My holiday decision was reaffirmed with the smooth booking process and excellent customer service. I wanted to stay for one night more than the allotted 7 nights, and that was efficiently arranged. Within minutes of booking, I received a call from the home owner who gave me even more information on the property, what to bring, how to get there and what we could expect the weather to be like. A great personal touch – it felt like we were going to stay with friends, rather than on an anonymous holiday complex.

We opted to go by ferry to Caen and drive the five hours to the Charente Maritime where the property was situated, rather than flying into La Rochelle which was the alternative. It was an easy journey on fast, mostly traffic free toll roads.

Small boys enjoying pain au chocolat on the ferry

On arrival, the kids thought Christmas had come early when they saw everything that was waiting for them to play with. In the courtyard there was table football, ping pong, basketball, darts, deck quoits, skittles, board games, countless bikes of all sizes and much more. But that was just the start. 

Just some of the kit available for us to use

The huge grounds also had a heated swimming pool with plenty of swimming toys, a zip wire, volley ball court, full size football pitch, mini tennis/badminton court, pirate ship sandpit, climbing frame, swings, trampoline, Little Tikes houses and ride ons, and a pet corner with chickens that the children could feed.

The lovely pool - which we swam in despite it only being April

Full size football pitch and volleyball/tennis



Kids climbing frame and trampoline





Perfect for toddlers - sandpit and playhouses

 Within minutes of arrival, our children had gone exploring, leaving us to check out our property, complete with welcome basket of essential foods and wine. We’d gone for Gîte Safran, one of five gîtes on site all clustered around the central courtyard. It had two beautifully decorated bedrooms (one double, one twin), with a bathroom between the two, and an open plan kitchen, dining room and sitting room all tastefully furnished and scrupulously clean. It was set back from the other gîtes, but had outside tables for al fresco dining on both sides – one overlooking the swimming pool and grounds, the other the courtyard – giving us privacy yet still being very sociable.

Gite Safran

Our hosts Michelle and Paul were immediately welcoming and introduced their children Sol and Safia to our boys. We also met the one other family staying in one of the other gîtes with their three boys.

Our lovely hosts

With a troop of small boys to charge around with, dens to build and intricate games of goodies vs baddies to play, we didn’t see our children for the next few days, except when their grumbling tummies brought them back for our al fresco lunches of crusty bread, creamy cheese and salty ham. This left my husband and I free to lounge next to the pool in the unseasonably warm high twenties temperatures, or take turns going for long bike rides through the undulating fields and vineyards.

A game of goodies v baddies going on in the trees

On his way to the den in the woods with treasure

We’d chosen the gîtes partly because of the location. Just a five minute bike ride to the local village for fresh bread and croissants, 10 minute drive to St Jean d’Angely, named as one of France’s 100 most beautiful villages, 10 minutes to Saintes with its ancient Roman ruins, 20 minutes from Cognac with fabulous tours of Cognac houses, 25 minutes to the beach and 45 minutes to La Rochelle with its cosmopolitan vibe.

The harbour fort at La Rochelle

La Rochelle Port

We visited all of these places and while the children enjoyed them, they would have preferred to stay at Belle Gites every single day. And it’s easy to understand why. The sleepy French village with its quiet country lanes made it safe enough for them to ride their bikes unaccompanied by an adult. They could explore the acres of woodland playing imaginative games. They had complete freedom to run wild and returned home each evening filthy, exhausted but utterly happy. As parents, we could genuinely relax, knowing they were safe and having the time of their lives.

We were incredibly lucky with the weather, with a daily average of around 25C. Had the weather been less kind, there is plenty to do indoors nearby like visiting the Atlantys Swimming Complex or The Aquarium in La Rochelle.

Hosts Michelle and Paul offer BBQ evenings, giving the guests a chance to know each other while eating delicious home cooked food. They also hold weekly football games with the local French residents, and guests are invited to take part. If you want a night out, they offer babysitting, a mini kids club in which they do arts & crafts, video nights for children complete with popcorn, and while we were there, they put on a fantastic Easter egg hunt. On our last night, they even set up a tent in the grounds for our and their children to have a camp out.

The Easter egg hunt (real and chocolate eggs were found!)

The football match with the locals

The kids got to camp out on the last night for added fun

My preconceived notions about spending my entire holiday cooking and cleaning were unfounded. Meals in France need to be nothing more than a smorgasbord of cheese, hams, breads, olives and fresh tomatoes – no cooking required. While our children are slightly older, even parents of babies and toddlers could easily have a relaxing break thanks to the layout of the gîtes, the services on offer and the extensive kit provided.

I’m a complete convert. We all returned home relaxed, refreshed, sun-kissed and in love with France.

While not all self-catering options are created equal, all those on the Tots to Travel website have been personally visited and vetted to ensure that they are safe for children, relaxing for parents and generally fabulous. Our toughest decision is where to go next with them – France, Spain, Italy or Portugal.

FACTS AND TOP TIPS

• Cost of accommodation: in Easter £640 for a week. Goes up to £875 per week in summer.
• Travel: Brittany Ferries - £371 return trip. Alternatively fly to La Rochelle (45 minutes drive from the Gites) on FlyBe, Jet2 or EasyJet
• Tolls: Approximately €40 each way
• Cognac tours: Try Hennessey which includes a boat trip or Remy Martin which includes a train ride
• Saintes: visit the Roman amphitheatre with children – little boys in particular will enjoy pretending to be gladiators in the ring
• Travel tip: we stayed overnight in Caen on our return due to an early start with the ferry. It would also be possible to leave at 2am and drive overnight, letting children sleep and get to the ferry in time. Alternatively, if driving up a day in advance, stop at the war cemeteries and D-Day landing beaches for some history.

The bleat returns (with a mostly French flavour)

I don't have the mental capacity to write a whole coherent blog post today (see bleat 1 as to why), so I offer you instead some bleats (a cross between a blog and a tweet):

Bleat 1: Cluster f**k
Today I was merrily working away, with a headache that has lingered for two days brewing quietly in the background. Then KAZAM! It hit. It felt as though someone had taken a tazer gun and rammed it up against my brain aimed it down towards my left eye and pulled the trigger. The pain in my head, eye and face was extraordinary. My eye started streaming tears and I was left gasping in pain, thinking that I was possibly dying. I crawled into bed and lay there hoping it would go away. It did. I woke up an hour and a half later with my head feeling as though someone had taken a baseball bat to it. I decided to see a doctor just to check it wasn't a brain embolism. Apparently I had a cluster headache. They're called cluster headaches as they apparently come in clusters. Oh joy. Because that was only number 1....

Bleat 2: Fattening France
We went to France. We ate baguettes and pain au chocolat and croissants and cheese and saucisson and more cheese and drank wine and washed it all down with Easter eggs. How is France not the fattest nation in the world? Even the salads are the size of small cars and are draped with cheese, gizzards, duck liver pate and fried bread or potatoes. I can see why they have so much wine - they have to, to dissolve the fat.

Bleat 3: How to enjoy a holiday with boy children
If you're going self-catering (which unless it's an all inclusive family friendly resort, you really want to do) make sure you stay somewhere that other families are too. Not the great unwashed you understand, but a small selection of nice families - like a gite cluster. The kids then have friends to play with. Make sure the property has lots of kit for them to play with and if not, lots of woods for them to play dens and gangs in. Do not attempt to do too much sightseeing. When you do, find sights that involve blood and gore as far as possible. We found a Roman amphitheatre which did nicely. Use ice cream as a daily incentive. (PS - we had an utterly fantastic holiday by following these principles. I can also say that rural France is a great place to let your children run wild, for any helicopter parents out there who feel the need to hover over their kids every day. It's safe as you like and they (and you) will be so much happier for the freedom).

Bleat 4: When you could just kiss your kids
While in France we decided to go to one of the Cognac houses in Cognac (funny that). We plumped for Remy Martin, not because it was the most child friendly, but because all the others had closed when we called to book. We knew that we were asking a lot of our children. But we patiently explained that mummy and daddy also need to do some things they like on holiday. (And there was the obligatory promise of ice cream). The tour took two hours. Two hours of a woman speaking in broken English about subject matter well above our children's heads. They had every right to be bored witless (we weren't but then we like alcohol). They had every opportunity to run amok and destroy the 100 year old cognac casks housing golden nectar that retails at £1600 per bottle. But they didn't. They were angels. Not a peep or a whinge or paddy. At the end of the tour an elderly couple came up to us and said: "When we saw you arrive, we said to each other - oh no, not kids, that will ruin it. But your children were impeccably behaved. What a pleasure to have them with us."

It's moment like that, right then, that all your children's past wrongs of refusing to eat vegetables and beating each other with sticks and farting in each other's faces and picking their noses at dinner tables and generally screaming and being annoying do not actually mean that they're ASBOs in waiting. And that on very rare occasions they do actually know how to be good. And the inner glow that gives you as a parent is almost as cockle warming as a glass of cognac. So thank you elderly couple for saying that. You made my year.

To crepe or not to crepe

So I've returned from Paris. I'd like to say that I feel thoroughly refreshed and relaxed and thrilled to be back. But I can say none of those things. It's not that Paris wasn't good. It was. Very cold. Lots of walking. Lots of eating. Even more drinking. But good.

However, going out looking glam two nights in a row for someone who seldom gets the chance to wave a mascara wand near her face is hard work. Walking about 8 miles in artic winds, trying to keep warm and still look glamorous is also hard work. Trying to make yourself understood when the only French you know is limited to hello, good bye, please, thank you, coffee and the bill is another thing that falls into the hard work genre. Particularly when the people you're trying to talk to look at you as though you've just been scraped off someone's shoe.

So it's a good tired, but a tired person I am none the less. And joy of deep joys, it appears that I either ate a dodgy baguette or got coughed on by someone sporting a diarrhea bug but I've become best friends with the bog since my return. Nice. It certainly ends the weekend on a romantic note.

While away I missed my children. Not on the first night or even much of the first day. Or even the second night. But by day two I was starting to have a few pangs of maternal missing-ness. And it was lovely to see the boys on our return. For the first five minutes. Then I wanted to get back on the train and return to rude waiters and gastro-laced crepes.

You see small boys are very good at wearing out their cute quotient in a hurry. We presented them with a few French chocolates, which they guzzled and then declared them defunct as they hadn't magically taught them to speak French. After that it all went down hill. I think children save their extra specially delightful behaviour for their parents as the childminder says they were a dream all weekend. Tonight ended with me having to get son 1's teeth dislodged from son 2's leg because apparently son 2 was sitting on son 1 and the reason he was apparently doing that was because son 1 wouldn't let son 2 look at the book. And that was just one of many 'welcome home mummy' incidents.

My poor husband whose birthday it is today is having to buy a ready meal curry from Sainsbury's for his birthday dinner as I am not up to much more than a slice of bread. Which is awful as we have a fridge full of lovely French cheese and saucisson. Sigh.

So on that cheery note I'm going to go downstairs and attempt to eat something and see how long it takes before it re-emerges in the world.

Holidays with children. How not to relax.

'A change is as good as a holiday' they say. And in theory, my holiday was a change. I was in France, rather than England (although it still rained). I ate ten times the amount of bread and cheese I normally consume. I had fabulous adult company every evening. And I had no access to TV or the internet. But really, that's where the differences end (and I'm not convinced that last point is a good thing).

You see, a holiday with children is something of an oxymoron. Holiday = relaxing. Children = not.
Think back to the BC years (Before Children). Holidays meant flinging a bikini in a bag with a couple of sarongs and a pair of flip flops. You'd jet off somewhere hot and exotic that inevitably had palm trees, sunloungers and frozen strawberry daiquiris. You'd roll out of bed at some point before lunch, spend the rest of the day horizontal reading chicklit while working on a tan, possibly doing the occasional bit of exercise or sightseeing, with lots of eating, drinking and generally RELAXING.

Fast forward to the AC years. As mentioned in my last blog post, the packing alone is enough to make you want to cancel the trip and stay home. But then there's the journey. Gone are the days of lovely gins and tonics on board a flight while you listen to your iPod in peace. Instead you're in a car so that you can cart half of Britain with you. As the mother (and this inevitably means you're not the driver) you spend most of the journey swivelled in your chair facing the backseat so that you can:

• catch vomit in carsick bags


• wipe up vomit


• break up fights because someone has put their hand on someone else's side of the seat


• pick up toys that have been dropped into the most inconvenient place that require elastigirl arms to reach them


• hand out snacks on an ongoing basis


• receive the half chewed remants of snacks, wrappers, banana skins, apple cores and find a place to stow them all


• play eye spy ad nauseum with children who don't actually spy the item in question and tell you that it starts with a letter which it doesn't and isn't the correct colour they claim it to be. And then get cross when you can't guess what it is.

You arrive at your destination with a crick in your neck, a good dose of car sickness yourself thanks to constantly facing backwards, and a vile mood.

Your destination is self catering. It has to be with kids. You need the washing machine, dishwashing and snack making facilities on call 24/7 - something no hotel can supply, not without having to remortgage your house. For about five minutes you embrace your inner little girl as you get to 'play house house', unpacking your supplies and figuring out who is going to sleep where. But that novelty wears off pretty fast.

And thus commences the holiday, filled with the promise of exciting thing to do - like canoeing, go-karting, seeing caves, fishing, sightseeing, going for walks, visiting markets and attempting to speak French - badly. I'm not such a killjoy as to claim that none of this was enjoyable - and indeed it was a change from the normal cycle of life.

However (and you just know that there had to be an however coming up) it never once felt like a holiday. Each outing required the same mini packing nightmare of spare clothes, nappies, snacks, cameras etc, etc, etc. If we stayed at home, the theory was that our children would gaily entertain themselves while we lay in the sun reading books. As I said, that was the theory. But as any parent knows, lying down, reading books and actually relaxing simply doesn't happen when there are small children remotely close by. In fact, children seem to have a built in homing device that alerts them to a parent who is approaching a state of rest. It immediately triggers an activation switch which propels them towards the said resting parent to annoy them, like a swarm of wasps buzzing around your head.

Just as you finish applying your sun cream in comes the first request. 'I need to poo.' Shortly followed by 'I'm hungry.' 'I'm bored.' 'Come play with me.' 'Watch this.' 'Can I sit on you?' 'Yowl!' 'He hit me.' 'He hit me first.' 'I had it first......'. So you give up lying down and attempt to play cricket with children who are incapable of hitting a ball so stand there swinging a bat at the air repeatedly. Or you push them on a swing. Or watch them paddle in the ice cold paddling pool. None of which is awful. But it's not quite the same as lying on your big fat bum doing nothing in peace, is it?

Then there's the merry go round of thinking about food, buying food, making food, serving food, washing after eating the food - and repeat. There's laundy and tidying up. And when you holiday with other people, there's an unwritten rule that you all need to pull your weight, so you end up doing more than you might ordinarily do at home (our laundry pile at home for example can sit unwashed for weeks on end) because you want everyone to be happy.

And then there's the fighting. As a holiday wears on and the novelty of having new friends to play with wears off, the children look for any opportunity to have an argument (for that read: beat the bejesus out of each other). Breaking up fights is never a deeply joyous affair, but it gradually starts to affect the parents and the thorny issue of parenting techniques starts to peep over the parapet. Thanks to a change in routine, later bedtimes and more sugar than usual, the children's behaviour dissolves into Lord of the Flies badness with tantrums the order of the day, putting your parentings techniques even more firmly in the spotlight.

And so your relaxing holiday turns into a merry go round of chores, fun activities that the kids will enjoy but probably don't top your list of things you must do before you die, and parenting battles.

Of course in my case it wasn't helped by having my husband leave after the first week so that he could return to work, leaving me to cope with the beastie boys on my own. The return trip alone wiped out any de-stressing that might have taken place in the odd stolen moment.

So I got home not feeling well rested. In fact feeling fairly shattered and in need of another holiday of the BC variety. But that isn't going to happen for at least another 16 years at the earliest, at which point we'll be booking ourselves onto a SAGA cruise and I'll have traded in my bikini for a one of those fetching granny swimsuits with low cut legs, built in tummy constrainer and a matching floral swiming cap to stop my blue rinse running. Now there's something to look forward to.

Holiday packing. It's crap.

Tomorrow we go on holiday. Our first proper holiday for a long, long time. I should be wildly enthusiastic and champing at the bit to get away. However, there is a small issue that stands between me and that holiday feeling. Packing.


I have written a list of everything we need. Not just on a scrap of paper you understand, but in a shiny new duck egg blue notebook which I got free in a magazine. I started the list a while ago and add to it whenever I think of something else that is absolutely vital. The way the list currently stands, we are going to need a our very own personal ferry to cart all our crap to France. It's not like we're going to Mongolia, Sudan or the Amazon. We don't need survival gear. As far as I know France is a first world country. Yet I still feel compelled to take everything we own on the off chance we might need it.


I would start to rationalise and make cuts to the list, but I know that the minute I delete an item, it'll be that very item which becomes the holiday 'must have'. And as the mother, it will be my fault that it's not there.


I am way too weary to start packing now. But I feel I have done good prep work. Besides my trusty list, I've done copious amounts of laundry (all of which was wet through thanks to the sodding rain), and have attempted to dry most of it. I've done my ironing (first time in two months). I've charged the camera batteries. I've ordered and received our European Health Cards. I've got foreign currency and travel insurance. I've bought an in-car DVD player and new DVDs to entertain the kids. And I've remembered to add travel sick pills to my list. I've still got to buy food supplies and I've yet to get a pedicure or tummy tuck, but I don't think I'm going to manage to squeeze those in between now and tomorrow evening.


So I'm pretty well organised. I just can't be arsed to actually get all the stuff and shove it into bags. Also, much of it needs to be packed directly from the garage into the boot of the car. And packing the car is husband's job. In fact it is any man's job. They have to have this job for two reasons:


Firstly, they don't do anything else related to the holiday besides throw a few pairs of undies and a couple of shirts in a bag for themselves. They don't have to book accomodation or make travel arrangements. They don't have to work out dates that suit everybody. They don't have to make lists of what to pack. They don't need to pack enough clothes for children that will cover 5 peed in pants a day, rain, mud, sunshine or a potential blizzard and still get it into a teeny tiny bag. They don't have to come up with a cunning packing plan that ensures you have a bag with enough snacks, drinks, changes of clothes, nappies, toys, books, medicine and baby wipes for every leg of the journey. They don't need to do any of the above really. They simply have to arrive at the alloted departure time with their own bag of kit and a mutter about 'all this crap' that they have to heave into the car.


Secondly, men like packing car boots. They find it cathartic. It reminds them of the days when they were small boys and got to build towers out of wooden blocks and had to make sure they had just the right piece to fit into just the right hole. I'll readily admit that I am rubbish at packing cars. Men excel at it. That is until you have to open the boot and get the one thing you forgot to pack in the emergency day sack (like moo moo the toy cow), which results in much swearing, rolling of eyes, sighing and tutting as though they are thoroughly exhausted with having to do all this holiday malarkey and must their darned wife try their patience now?


So no, I'm not feeling thrilled at the prospect of going on holiday right this minute. I'm sure that once the car is packed, we've survived the overnight ferry crossing, the five hour car drive, found our destination, managed to cobble together a meal for starving children on the remaining car snacks, and I can sit down and enjoy a glass - make that a bottle - of French wine, I will be very happy to be away. But until then, I've got a bit of work to do.


So blog readers, I shall not be blogging until my return, no doubt armed with tales of how thanks to my perfect packing skills, the holiday was a dream (except for the part where I have to drive two boys across France on my own on the return as husband's leaving early to get back to work. Goody).


I do hope that it stops raining at some point otherwise we could well be returning to a flooded house, which might negate the relaxation afforded by the holiday.

Do wish me Bonne Chance!
Toodle pip