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.