A family holiday with very young children that also lets you take in the sights and sounds of Paris can be arranged with
minimal fuss
Our trip to northern France with outdoor holiday firm Eurocamp allowed my wife and I to give our son a week of entertainment and activities with a bit of culture on the side for ourselves.
Eurocamp provided self-catering accommodation at La Croix du Vieux Pont in the sleepy village of Berny-Riviere, about 60 miles north-east of the French capital.
A lot of Eurocamp customers travel by car and ferry, but we opted to forego driving most of the length of Britain with our son – who has been known to projectile vomit while in transit – and fly to Charles de Gaulle.
We picked up our rental car and reached our destination in an hour after completing the fraught task of finding the right exit road from the airport. The road signs weren’t helpful, and at one point I thought we’d have to double back and order a sat-nav.
The camp had a good selection of its own restaurants and bars as well as a shop where we could buy essentials for cooking and cleaning in our well-equipped holiday home.
The bakery, which dished out fresh baguettes, croissants and other pastries every day, was a real perk. Additional eating and drinking options and more substantial supermarkets could be found just a 10-minute walk away in the small town of Vic-sur-Aisne.
It was there that I buried the hatchet and tried frogs legs, a feat I’d been unable to achieve during my last visit to France on a school exchange trip 15 years earlier.
My wife loves French language and culture, but had never managed to set foot there, so a trip to Paris had been high on the list of holiday priorities for quite a while.
However, the thought of taking our son on a city break, even if only for a couple of days, struck me as an onerous and stressful prospect.
It goes without saying that when you’ve got young kids, particularly highly mischievous two-point-something-year-olds, they need lots of child-oriented activities interspersed with naps, something that big cities struggle to offer with convenience.
But Eurocamp’s day-trips to Paris meant I could help my wife fulfil one of her dreams over the course of a holiday that was predominantly geared toward keeping our son happy.
The chartered coach also meant I did not have to worry about negotiating the roads of Paris city centre in a hire car with him throwing a wobbly.
For just over £40 the three of us got the coach from the holiday parc at 7:50am and were in Paris just two hours later.
Happily, our son slept most of the way and was refreshed and ready for a day of exploring.
We were dropped off about a stone’s throw from L’arc de Triomphe and made our way there first, before taking the metro over to the Eiffel Tower where we took in the breathtaking views over the city.
The queuing system for entry to the tower was frustratingly ad hoc, so much so that after an hour of standing around, one group of tourists in our line clapped and cheered when we were told our turn would be next.
It wasted quite a lot of time, but it’s something you’ve got to do when in Paris.
Our next move was a stroll along the Seine as far as the Louvre art gallery.
It would have been a far quicker walk from A to B, but the southern embankment offers about a mile’s worth of entertainment in the form of boats, food, music and recreation areas.
Our son was completely taken by two orange capsule hotels that were built in the US in the 70s and 80s and was allowed in for an extended rummage.
After a quick bite to eat, we headed over to Notre Dame before shuttling back to the meeting point for a 6:45pm departure back to the camp and another well-earned snooze for our son.
Having forked out for a hire car, it would have been a waste to leave it sitting outside our holiday home in between trips to and from the airport.
With that in mind, we took it out for a 20-mile spin to Compiegne, a charming Picardy town where Joan of Arc was captured and handed over to the English in 1430.
You could tour St Jacques cathedral – where she prayed in the morning before being seized – as well as the town’s chateau with its three museums, including that of the Second French Empire.
As a history buff, the main selling point of Compiegne for me was the forest that shares the town’s name. Situated there is the Armistice Clearing where Germany officially surrendered in World War I. The same location was chosen by Hitler for France’s surrender to the Nazis in 1940.
The clearing boasts a small but fascinating museum featuring a replica of the railcar in which the 1918 armistice was signed.
Back to the camp and its swimming pools were a highlight of the holiday – we rarely ventured far from them once the temperature picked up towards 30 degrees celsius at the end of the week. They had a range of slides that our son could use on his own, as well as faster ones that I could accompany him on … again and again and again.
Most pools were covered by a retractable plastic roof so we could splash around for longer without having to worry about reapplying sun lotion.
Another bonus of the roofing was that it provided bathers with shelter on the first day, which saw constant rain and could have turned into a washout.
As it was, there was plenty to do thanks to the indoor soft play area, bowling alley and games room.
And Eurocamp’s couriers laid on plenty of activities for pre-school kids.
My son took part in the learn-to-swim sessions, while bike-riding instruction was also on offer. An enthusiastic dancer, he had a ball at the children’s disco and barbecue at the bar beside the camp’s artificial beach.
The budding football fanatic also spent a lot of time at the camp’s indoor football pitch knocking about with older kids who took him under his wing.
There was so much to do at the camp that I felt this holiday would act as a trial run for us to work out how to make the most of all that was on offer with future trips in mind.
- Eurocamp is the leading provider of outdoors holidays and helps more than 500,000 holidaymakers plan fantastic trips to Europe each year. They offer more than 180 prime locations that are ideal for any kind of holiday: from beach and citybreaks, to stays amongst mountains and lakes. Most importantly, there is a range of travel options, including flight, ferry and driving, and total flexibility when it comes to arrival and departure dates. To book visit www.eurocamp.co.uk or contact the customer service team on 0844 406 0402. A 2-bed mobile home off peak costs from £93 and in peak season from £152.80.