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.