The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
FAMILY FAVOURITES
HOW TO BE HAPPY ON HOLIDAY
Happy family holidays are all alike; every unhappy family holiday fails in its own way, as Tolstoy nearly wrote.
I recently returned from a happy week en famille in Languedoc’s beach country. We built sandcastles by the Med and took the children on safari in Sigean (reserveafricainesigean.fr)
We dined at Chez Bebelle (chezbebelle.fr), perhaps the most familyfriendly restaurant in the world. Hidden down an aisle in Narbonne’s food market, Bebelle serves only chips with meat, which the owner orders from neighbouring butchers, via megaphone. When ready, the meat – horse or beef, tartare or bavette – is tied in a plastic bag and tossed, like a rugby ball, through the air to M. Babelle, who plates it or grills it and plunks it in front of you. Dinner theatre for the under-10s.
We luxuriated in the expanse of a 19th-century bourgeois town house, the dining room of which has more square footage than our London flat.
It was the perfect holiday, and this realisation led me, on the long drive home, to ask my children what their favourite part of the trip had been.
“The Eurotunnel,” my daughter, who is four, said with enthusiasm. “It’s so funny to see cars on trains.”
My two-year-old son did little more to endorse my sense of good parenting. “French Orangina is better than English,” he observed.
Ignoring the children’s eccentricities, our week in France did make me wonder: is there a formula for a happy family holiday?
According to a survey from HomeAway holiday rentals, there is: nearly half of the British public want to be on the beach; a similar number require sun. Spending time with family and friends is high on our list of priorities. One in five of us sees holidays as time to catch up on sleep.
There you have it: water; vitamin D; sleep. Why mess with a good formula? Here are my ingredients for a happy holiday: Plan one activity per day. Make meals part of the fun. If you have young children, forget about the routine. Turn off your phone. Try something new.