My daughter just loved the hot baths of Budapest

Christopher Gough,

This week’s winner, found the perfect holiday location for his autistic girl

Abigail wore a huge smile. She was beaming from ear to ear. “It’s warm,” she purred. “It’s like a big bath.” As anyone who’s holidayed with an autistic child will testify, these moments are rare and our hearts melted.

We’ve always refused to be defined by our daughter’s condition, or by our status as carer-parents, and we’ve dragged her around the globe, praying that at some point she’d be as enthused as we are by novelty and splendour.

Alas, apart from the occasional recognition of an icon – she’d seen the Eiffel Tower in Ratatouille – exploration has been an ordeal. Days are largely spent negotiating when we return to our hotel to log in to the internet or cram a DVD into the laptop we’re forced to cart around.

I remember arriving at a hotel in Luxor. Abigail was unimpressed by the turquoise pool that spilt into the Nile or the human-size chess board nestling between palms. On entering our hut, having ignored the two hammocks swaying on the veranda, she had only one observation to make: “There isn’t a TV!”

So here we were in Budapest. We knew the pools and spas would be a distraction but we couldn’t

possibly have foreseen to what extent. It was our first afternoon and we tore Abigail away from a Hungarian cartoon series and gerrymandered her towards the baths. The mosaic floors and echoing chambers stirred her imagination and by the time she arrived at the side of the first ornately tiled pool, she was animated. However, it was when she leapt into the water and then surfaced with that huge grin that we knew we’d hit the jackpot.

We’d chosen the right hotel, too. It had the biggest, most popular public spa in

When she came up with that huge grin, we saw we’d hit the jackpot

the city. Apart from the pool Abigail now basked in, it boasted an ornate Romanstyle main pool, separate male and female parlours (each with even hotter mini-pools), an outdoor pool with a wave machine, an outdoor Jacuzzi and a luxury sauna. What’s more, we didn’t have to queue with all the non-residents to enjoy the facilities. We had our own secret passage that ran from our floor, through the fragranced massage area and down a twisting iron staircase. We could even don our swimwear and bathrobes in our hotel room.

We now had the perfect bargaining tool. “If you stop touching the pictures in the art gallery, don’t run in front of a tram and sit still through lunch, you can spend the whole afternoon back in the hot baths!” But by the end of the week we were no longer negotiating. We were all aching to be back at the hotel by noon. If my memory serves me correctly, we forsook the sightseeing altogether at least once, wrapping ourselves in our freshly laundered robes straight after breakfast.