blog

Knowing When To Get Lost

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:37:14 +0100

I try hard to buy local produce when I’m away from home, whether I’m self-catering or eating out. I’m not just being pious – surely one of the ways of truly getting to know a place is through its food?

It was disheartening, therefore, when arriving at a Feather Down Farm on the edge of the gorgeous Trough of Bowland in Lancashire, to spot other families unloading Tesco bags from their car-boots when there was such a wonderful honesty shop on-site, selling Dolphinholme Farm’s own luscious, mild goat’s cheese and other local goodies. A hotelier friend in Devon tells me he has the same problem with people staying in his self-catering properties, who almost all order deliveries from familiar supermarket chains rather than seeking out regional produce.

I also love to mine locals’ knowledge and expertise when writing about a place. When researching Liverpool for my chapter in the Frommer’s England with Wales guidebook, for instance, I chatted to friends who had grown up or lived there, and also talked to people I know who live there now, and people that they know in turn. All gave me very different perspectives on the city, whether it was on cafés beloved of locals or off-the-beaten track art venues. I also find Tripadvisor very useful in this respect – for all its bad press, the way it links with your Facebook account to help you sound out friends and acquaintances for their personal recommendations on specific locations is brilliant.

I think this kind of insider, on-the-ground knowledge is particularly valuable to those travelling with kids, who can’t waste time ambling around looking for a child-friendly restaurant or risk choosing a hotel on a street where you’ll all be kept awake by party noise. Parents want to know where the locals go, where the locals eat. That’s partly why I do what I do – with every guidebook, destination guide or feature I write, I hope to save others the time-consuming donkey work of research by putting in the hours (and footwork) myself. From the perspective of a parent rather than a travel writer, I know just how exhausting it can be so much as deciding where to go in the first place, let along arranging the specifics.

The one time this reliance on ‘insider’ knowledge threatened to let me down was when I was exploring Newcastle with my sons. We’d done the fabulous Seven Stories, a sort of museum of children’s literature, and were on our way to the Life Science Centre. En route, our taxi driver started making ominous noises – the Centre was overrated, he said, and expensive. Couldn’t he drop us off at the nearby Discovery Museum, which was free…?

He was so persistent that I panicked a bit. We’d pre-bought tickets for the Life Science Centre, so we had to stick with that, but I felt downcast: the driver thought I was a loser, I’d made a bad decision for my boys, and we were going to have a terrible time.

We had a ball – the museum is a gem, crammed with some of the most brilliantly conceived and thought-provoking interactive exhibits I’ve ever seen. Though smaller than London’s Science Museum, it rivals it in many ways in sheer inventiveness – the boys loved finding out how many plastic litre bottles the water in their body would fill, dressing as Inuits and building an igloo, taking part in a live science show, digging for skeletons, and comparing their size of their hands against those of apes.

Afterwards, I pondered on the taxi driver’s strange fixation with taking us to a different venue, and a bit of research brought me to this piece on 'destination management', which reveals that more than 400 people in Newcastle and Gateshead, ‘from taxi drivers to bar staff and hotel general managers’, were given workshops on sharing their local expertise with visitors. This is all very commendable, yet it leaves me a little suspicious. Was the taxi driver instructed to recommend the free museum because it’s a local council museum, as opposed to a private concern (albeit an educational charity)? Were visitor numbers low at the local museum, prompting a drive to encourage visitors to go there?

Whatever the reasoning, I was glad we resisted and didn’t miss out on an excellent day out. I was also glad when, sallying forth from our apartment that night to buy some groceries, I got hopelessly lost and happened upon a wonderful little pop-up shop, Made in Newcastle, selling all kinds of artsy craft items I hadn’t known I wanted, from Enid Blyton drinks coasters to retro mohair jumpers, all by local creatives. Cue an interlude of child-free browsing all the more pleasurable for being unexpected.

Ultimately, I guess, however good your guide – or your guidebook – you need to discover a place for yourself, and in doing so make it your own.

Travellling Creatively with Kids, or Why Manchester Rocks

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:00:12 +0100

The following post is based largely on a blog I wrote for Takethefamily.com in autumn 2011.

I’ve written before about the joys of ‘holidaying’ close to home, and about the pleasure of short breaks with kids. This year I’ve been out and about all over the north of England with my boys, on day-trips, overnighters or mini-breaks. With the help of our money-saving Family & Friends Railcard, the opportunities for cultural excursions within easy reach of home are almost unlimited. York, Leeds, Liverpool and Newcastle are all great northern cities we've explored together in 2011 and at very little cost.

Manchester is lucky enough to have an award-winning online magazine, Creative Tourist, published by a consortium of nine local museums and galleries who share a vision of staging “intelligent, thought-provoking and outward-looking events” and of celebrating their city at the same time. It’s been so successful that 40% of users say that it totally changed their perceptions of Manchester.

One such event was this past weekend’s Manchester Weekender, a series of one-off, intimate events that aim to “sum up the city”. The agenda for 2011 included ‘cultural provocateur’ and northerner Jarvis Cocker interviewed by DJ Dave Haslam, author of ‘Manchester, England’, a classic guide to the city’s radical and musical history. There was also a whole raft of family-oriented events, many of them free and drop-in, which meant you could take the weekend at a fairly relaxed pace, generally dropping into venues and spending as long as you wanted there depending on what snagged your interest.

One exception was the book-ahead Family Floating Day Out, part of the concurrent Manchester Food & Drink Festival. Beginning outside the waterside gastro-pub The Mark Addy (itself handy for the family-friendly Peoples’ History Museum), this boat-trip took families along the historic waterway connecting Manchester itself with Salford Quays, home to the new BBC HQ. Tables on board the boat were filled with craft materials for making paper boats and flags to wave each time we spotted one of the items listed – herons (tick), graffiti (tick), and so on. The foodie element was a currant-filled Chorley cake (a relative of the Eccles cake) to munch on as you worked. Once you’ve arrived, there’s lots of things to do at the Quays: we took the opportunity to revisit the Imperial War Museum North, where the Weekender event was a pop-up darkroom where kids could develop their own photos. Then it was home again, by return-boat or by sleek new tram.

There are few things better in life than a spot of Sunday-morning jazz, and the Weekender again came up trumps with a second chance to hear Living Story Music Ensemble’s jazz interpretation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s ‘The Smartest Giant in Town’, which had premiered at the Manchester Jazz Festival this summer. Performed at the ever-wonderful Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), this was preceded by a puppet-making workshop during which kids could make finger-puppets of the various animal characters from the book. Although this was pitched at younger kids, my older boys (7 and 9) were transfixed by the musicians interpreting the various animals through their different instruments, and we were all still singing the catchy songs long after we’d left the museum and wandered back through town.

The Whitworth Art Gallery was the one venue we hadn’t been to at some point in the past (much to our shame). After lunch in its excellent café, The Modern Caterer, we headed for its Weekender event, Dark Drawings, which allowed us to create our own shadow projections on the gallery walls. This was part of the gallery’s current exhibition, Dark Matters (until 15 Jan 2012), a stunning show on the notions of shadow, darkness and illusion that I’ll be revisiting without the distraction of kids. Afterwards, we happened upon a ‘scientific drawing event’ based on molecular patterns that was taking part on the other side of the gallery – part of the Big Draw 2011, running nationwide for the whole of October.

These were just our choice of events, and there were dozens more, mainly free, happening all over the city all weekend. For me, it was a case of trying to find activities to suit children of different ages (my youngest son is 3), but I’ll be leaving him behind to try out another great Creative Tourist offering, the Manchester Mini Explorer (£8), a beautifully produced activity bag aimed at ages 5–10, containing 4 self-guided trails (each taking around 2hrs, one of them including Castlefield with its canals and Roman remains), plus games, puzzles, fun cards and discounts for museums and galleries. But more about the Mini Explorer in due course…

Self-catering apartments are always a good choice for a city break with kids, and Stay Manchester is a fine example within very easy reach of Piccadilly Station.

Stuff and Nonsense

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:51:18 +0100

The one big downside to travelling with kids is the sheer amount of clobber you have to take with you. On our latest trip – a three-week jaunt around Brittany, doing some of the research and photography for the 2nd edition of my Frommer’s Brittany With Your Family guide – we crammed the car to the hilt but still ran out of clean clothes within a week. So though we loved the seaside hotels we stayed in for the first few days, we were glad to get to our P&V apartment complex and load up one of the monster washing machines in their launderette.

Of course babies and toddlers are impossible – at least with older kids you can count on getting by with new set of clothes per day, or even the same set over two days or (shudder) more. And with older kids, there’s no need for bulky items such as nappies and portable highchairs and less need for quite so many space-stealing toys, as books, comics and hand-held gadgets become the entertainment of choice.

This is all good reason for travelling by car – I rarely fly with my kids for various reasons, but if I did, I just don’t know how I’d take everything we need. By the end of this year, we’ll have made at least six ferry trips and driven more miles than we’d care to think about. We all know driving is far from environmentally friendly, but it’s more so than flying and then driving. And ferries are ecologically friendly and even quite good fun – my boys love the novelty of sleeping afloat, especially now they’re old enough for the top bunks, but we’ve found that even nine-hour day crossings can fly by as they find other kids to play with in the entertainment area.

I’ve tried to find ways of travelling light with kids, but there are no easy answers. Even when travelling to Florence by train last year, we needed five substantial cases/bags/backpacks between us. In any case, squashing everybody’s stuff into as few bags as possible can work against you – whatever you need at any given moment is almost guaranteed to be at the bottom and to require complete unpacking of the bag. If you must share cases, Eagle Creek’s ‘Pack It’ Cubes look like they’ll keep everything neatly separate and easy to identify – and your sanity unshredded.

Some form of wheel-a-long baggage can be handy, as can luggage that can clip to other pieces of luggage for ease or security (or both). As my kids get older, I’m thinking of trying out one medium-sized wheelie case per adult, plus one wheeled backpack for each member of the family, according to size (NB for kids you need to limit the backpack weight to 20% of the child’s body weight). I’m currently eyeing up Timberland's Polar Night Wheeled Backpack with Daypack as a supremely flexible piece of luggage, or Eaglecreek again has an interesting and versatile ‘Twist Pack’. For kids, Kidstravel2 seems to have by far the best choice.

In the past, I’ve been seized by such horrific last-minute packing panics that this time I swore I’d have everything ready a fortnight in advance. That didn’t happen – surprise, surprise – but I did find that at least by starting early, I had the leisure and presence of mind to edit things down as it dawned on me that they weren’t actually essential.

Sadly, though, no amount of savvy packing can get around the fact that you can never pack enough clothes to get you beyond a week without doing some laundry. As an independent traveller, this isn’t a problem – take a bottle of Travelproof Ultimate Travelwash (fit for everything from clothes to hair and skin) and wash your clothes as you go along. With kids, the clothes situation can quickly get out of hand. Ever tried leaving damp, porridge-encrusted PJs in a bag for a couple of days, especially in warm weather?

Which is why I'm living for self-cleaning clothes – according to several articles published a couple of year back, including this and this, they're due to hit the shops any day now. All hail nanotechnology!

Any tips and advice on travelling light with kids gratefully received over on the Takethefamily forum.

Who's boss?

Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:31:28 +0100

All travel carries an element of risk, although most parents – myself included – tend to play it on the safe side, especially with younger kids. For reasons not only of expense but also sheer practicality and the sake of an easy life, most of our family's current wanderings are limited to Europe. I’d love to take my kids elephant-riding in India, surfing in Hawaii and on long-distance trains across Australia, but such adventures will have to wait for I time when I consider the inherent dangers (and the expense) to be justified by their enjoyment. At 7, 5 and 2, they’re not yet at a point where they can fully appreciate that kind of holiday.

Children like routine, we’re told, and though I’ve never been a devotee of Gina Ford and her military-style regimes, I’ve always tried to keep my kids on a loose schedule. If I’m honest, this may have been more for my sake than theirs – with the two older boys only a year-and-a-half apart, getting them to nap together and to bed at a reasonable hour allowed my husband and I to keep the boys at home and muddle through as freelance writers – and stay sane.

Regularity, repetition and ritual give young kids a sense of security, a feeling that the world is orderly and subject to our control. But of course it’s not. As the ash cloud has forcefully reminded us, we humans are not as in control as we’d like to think we are. Sometimes nature lets us know who’s really boss.

But in terms of travelling with kids, I’d argue that the loss of control is yet another good reason why we take them away. Children’s lives become so hidebound by routine and schedules, it’s great to get away and let a bit of slack into their lives. So what if they’re running around in the woods until gone 10 o’clock, or want to go for a night-time dip in the waves – they can always lie-in in the morning (those with infants who wake with the larks will be glad to hear that this can and will happen, in time).

But more fundamentally, isn’t it desirable to start subtly, subconsciously, letting slightly older children in on the secret that we – as parents, but also as members of the human race – are not always in charge? That things can and do go wrong. That life is unpredictable and sometimes even dangerous, without us being able to do anything about it. That sometimes we might not be able to get home.

While I don’t envy my colleagues at takethefamily.com who got stranded abroad with their young kids, and while I don’t doubt that it must have been a royal pain in the bum a lot of the time, I think my older sons would have taken the fact of being stranded abroad as an adventure and – despite the waiting around and the tedium – in many ways relished the excitement of it. In fact, I rather suspect that they’re reaching the age where they actually quite like things to go wrong, because it’s interesting and perhaps even fun.

All travel carries some risk, but then so does crossing the road, driving to the supermarket or playing on the trampoline in the garden. That things can and usually will go wrong isn’t a reason not to go away. In fact, isn’t it the horror stories that make the best travel anecdotes, in any case? Who wants to hear about beaches, after all? There’s more than a little schadenfreude in us all.

delete

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 13:17:41 +0100

What Kind of a Traveller am I?

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 13:06:18 +0100

This feature from the blog 501 Places, about how different sorts of travellers approach new places, made me laugh and cringe at the same time.

I’m ashamed to say that I’m a Military General, with everything planned out in the finest detail. On our latest trip to Amsterdam, I printed out a map and marked each hotel, restaurant and sight that we were to visit, then I worked out how we were going to get to each one. With two young boys and a toddler in tow, I wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

It wasn’t always so. In days of yore, I was very much the fearless wanderer, leaping onto trans-continental trains at whim, barely glancing at guidebooks before arriving in a destination, getting to town late at night without pre-booked accommodation or sometimes even the faintest idea of where to stay,… It was mad and glorious, and I took it all for granted. It’s only now that I appreciate the intoxicating hedonism of those freewheeling days.

Of course, when you’re responsible only for yourself, it doesn’t matter if you screw up and end up spending the night on a bench in the bus station or dining on the last stale croissant left in the shop. The scrapes you inevitably get into are all part of the romance of travel. With kids, finding yourself without a hotel room or discovering that every restaurant in town has closed for the night or that there’s nowhere to get nappies and milk, is no laughing matter.

On the other hand, I don’t want to turn into a travel fascist who reduces each holiday to a series of boxes that have to be ticked. There has to be room for the spontaneous – it’s often the unplanned, most random experiences that form our most lasting and precious of memories. Part of the problem is that I’m a travel writer as well as a travelling parent, which means that I generally approach a destination with a specific agenda and have a certain number of places that I have to visit and review. This can make for a certain rigidity.

Happily, then, there’s must be a little of the Useless Planner in me too. I draw up lists, make dots on maps, and construct schedules, only for them to crumble in the face of intractable reality. The toddler doesn’t nap when he should, or the boys are hungry earlier than expected or don’t fancy pancakes, or somebody throws up, or we get lost, or the weather lets us down. Or a combination of the aforementioned. And that’s when the real holiday starts – when we’re forced to wing it, and in doing so, open ourselves up to the chance events and encounters that are what travel is really all about.

What about you? What sort of a family explorer are you?

Family Holidays: an Oxymoron?

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:51:46 +0100

Having just returned, exhausted, from our latest family odyssey – the Netherlands – I ponder the words of my Takethefamily colleague Dea Birkett on her latest blog:

“I suppose every holiday doesn’t have to be an adventure. Does it?’”

I’m wondering whether, conversely, all holidays don’t change our lives, even if we don’t realise it at the time? Each time we go away, don’t we get to know ourselves and one another a little better? Doesn’t every trip, whether conceived as an adventure or not, help a person to find/define their place in the world? And surely that is the very definition of parenting, too – helping kids to find their place and their way in the world.

Kids learn about the world and their place in it whether they’re screeching with terror on a schlocky themepark ride or touring the chateaux of the Loire, whether they’re swinging through the trees on an adventure course or looking at the gory mythological sculptures outside the Uffizi gallery. In Amsterdam, we went to the zoo but we also toured the Van Gogh Museum, where my five-year-old, casting off the headphones of his audio-tour, demanded paper and then sat down in the midst of the craning crowds to draw himself into a frenzy. We spent a day toying with the gizmos and gadgets at the Nemo science museum, but we also passed an afternoon learning about the medieval shenanigans at the atmospheric Muiderslot castle. We also spent hours in the Aquafun waterworld at a holiday park where culture was totally off the agenda.

This, for me, is the essence of the successful family holiday – the obvious kids’ stuff, interspersed with the non-obvious stuff. We parents may think that we’d really rather like a chill out in a five-star hotel, but that won’t light the kids’ fire – at least, not after they’ve exhausted the Playstation and the DVD library. Kids don’t care about fluffy bathrobes, junior toiletries or turndown (except for the cookies). They don’t care about luxury and comfort. What they care about, though they couldn’t articulate it, is new stuff. Experience. The great unknown. Kids want to be surprised. They want to sleep in tents or treehouses, catch crabs in rockpools and climb castle towers. They want to sleep on ferries that take them through the night, then ride rollercoasters that take them upside down.

The Netherlands was cold and wet, even snowy at times. Just like the UK, but colder. My middle son got sick in the middle of the water-park romps, and then I got sick too. I wanted to curl up in bed and sleep it all away, but that wasn’t an option – my husband couldn’t cope with biking three young boys around a strange city to do all the things we had planned, and I couldn’t expect them all to stay cooped up in a hotel room until I was recovered. I crawled out of bed, gritted my teeth, and got on with it. The days seemed endless. I’ve never been so cold in my life.

Yet now I’m back, I look at our photos, and the pain of cycling and walking around in the freezing fog without a calorie to sustain me has given way to the knowledge that we all did learn about ourselves during our 10-day trip. Again, it’s not necessarily things that can be put into words, but we all came back changed to some degree.

The question of why people travel (to learn about other cultures, to escape daily life, to gain self-knowledge, to rest are just some of the possible answers) comes into much sharper focus after one becomes a parent. Holidaying with kids is far from a rest – it’s plain exhausting, unless you take a nanny and possibly also a butler and a chauffeur along with you. And though you might be freed, to some degree, from domestic drudgery, you’ll probably find that life is actually harder than it is at home – you have bags to hump around, overtired and fractious kids to contend with, and scarcely a second to sit down and watch the daisies grow. Unless you take an all-inclusive package holiday with full-on childcare, your trip will resemble kind of military expedition, like it or not. If you don't get home more knackered than when you set out, chances are you're doing something wrong.

But the end-point of any odyssey is home – like Dorothy, I can only click my heels and agree that there’s no place like it. So perhaps the real point of going away is to come back to our everyday lives and to one another with fresh eyes, having learnt to appreciate them all the more.

Kings of the Castle

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 17:45:43 +0100

It’s a killer, realising that the kids are moving away from you, that you are no longer indispensable to them. But maybe maturity, as a parent, lies in accepting this is a cause for celebration as much as for sadness.

In October, having climbed one of the towers of Suffolk’s Framlingham Castle with my eldest boys Ethan and Ripley, I stepped out onto the narrow walkway leading around the top of the 13-metre-high curtain walls and felt my legs turn to jelly under me. At first I put it down to panic that Ripley, the middle boy, has always suffered from severe vertigo – to the point of actually screaming in aeroplanes or when walking on floors so highly polished they look like glass built over empty space. But once Ripley had reassured me that, for the first time in a situation involving heights, he was actually fine, it was up to me to face my own fears and phobias.

For a few seconds I stood, heart hammering, breath ragged, telling the boys that there was no way we could go round, that Mummy simply couldn’t do it. The trouble was, we were part-way through a Halloween trail of the 12th-century castle, and some of the remaining clues were dotted around the walkway. Looking at the boys’ desperate faces, I felt like an abject failure.

Finally, unwilling to give up, they told me they’d do the walkway by themselves. I looked at them, seven and five-and-a-half, newly fearless, and while I knew they could do it – sturdy metal barriers meant there was no danger of falling – I realised that watching them complete the circuit without me would actually be more painful for me than forcing myself to do it. It would mean conceding that they didn’t need me any more – admitting it both to myself and to them.

Telling myself that I couldn’t let them go in case Ripley did freak out part of the way round, I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other and follow them around the ramparts, not looking down and not enjoying the views over the surrounding countryside, which are said to be stunning. The boys were completely unfazed, prancing along looking for the pumpkin buckets containing clues that would ensure them a prize in the gift shop, not even slowing down at the wooden plank bridges through the towers, passing over hellish sheer drops…

I was proud for my five-year-old at having gone beyond his fear of heights, and embarrassed that my own, if anything, seemed to have worsened – other visitors we met on the way round noticed how I was grasping the railings idiotically, my jaw clenched. Of course, there’s nothing a mother can’t or won’t do for the love of her children, and 15 minutes of wobbly legs, a dry throat and a racing heart walking around a castle ramparts is no great shakes, if you’ll pardon the pun. But over and above all heroics and sacrifices, surely one of the hardest parts of being a parent is knowing when to set them free. Up on the wall-walk, I learned that even as I clung on for dear life, I had to let go.