Best: MANUELS FARM, CORNWALL
Istanbul was inspiring, Tuscany a treat, but for sheer fun, you can’t beat standing in a muddy field with your four-year-old daughter, watching a bull defecate. She laughed her Barbie socks off. A few days helping out at Manuels, a real working farm near Newquay, left the whole family grubby, happy and a wee bit wiser about the realities of the natural world. They’re still talking about the size of Boris the boar’s gonads. Call 01637 878300; cottages from £50 per night.

Worst: ATLANTIS RESORT, BAHAMAS
How to sum up the sheer ghastliness of the place? Picture 5,000 generously proportioned Americans gambling, gorging and galumphing their way round a resort where the devotion to fatuous fakery extends to purpose-built archeological “finds”, introduced with po-faced reverence by dedicated guides. It’s a gargantuan vision of tropical consumer hell, Dante’s Inferno with Ambre Solaire. Good buffets, though.

Stephen Bleach

Best: NORTHERN TERRITORY, AUSTRALIA

I had no real urge to go to Australia, let alone the outback. How wrong I was. Two weeks zooming around the infinite desert of the Northern Territory had me hooked. Indescribably beautiful scenery, dangerously exciting wildlife and seemingly no rules whatsoever. It was like a trip back to the Wild West, guns and all. I jumped off waterfalls, bumped into magnetic termite hills and drank my own body weight in beer: sheer heaven. Even the locals were fabulous. I half expected a rather chippy, hostile population. Instead, they were the most hospitable and funny people I’ve met on my travels. I’m just glad I got out of there before the Ashes. Contact Hunter Safaris (00 61 8 8983 3224, www.huntersafaris.com.au); for a guide, e-mail Andy Mortimer (andymorts@hotmail.com).

Worst: ANJUNA BEACH, GOA

It was like the past 10 years had never happened. This admittedly beautiful beach is littered with the detritus of subcultures I thought we’d long got over. Five bars in a row blare out nonstop trance music while heavily tattooed hippies and Germans in thongs lie around like stoned driftwood. Anjuna is what I’ve been trying to avoid all my life. It was like visiting a place where all the people you hated when you were growing up had decided to move en masse. Don’t Goa to Goa.

Dom Joly

Best: SARDINIA

Don’t go in August, everyone told me. Sardinia is hideously hot and insanely crowded. I went in August, with the kids. We loved it. The coastline west of Cagliari is the Med of my imagination: miles of white-sand beaches, craggy, pine-shaded coves and the most astonishingly limpid cobalt sea. We made endless sand castles, took evening passeggiate in the Roman town of Pula and ate in atmospheric restaurants where the waiters tolerated our noisy two-year-old and my excruciating Italian. Sure, it was busy, but with beautiful Italians, not boorish Brits. My tip? Rent a villa with Voyages Ilena (020 7924 4440, www.voyagesilena.co.uk), hire a car and don’t be stingy with the granitas.

Worst: STONEHENGE

Arriving here ought to be a lump-in-the-throat experience. Instead, it brings a bad taste to the mouth. Squatting on the verge of the A344, the 5,000-year-old stones are enclosed by a high fence and approached via a tawdry visitors’ centre. Yet my visit was a happy one, accompanied by the archeologist Andrew Lawson on a private early-morning tour inside the stone circle. We walked the surrounding chalk hills, discovered ancient burial mounds and hiked along a prehistoric routeway. Stonehenge slowly, majestically, appeared above the horizon. This, if the government finally approves plans to grass over the A344 and bury the nearby A303 in a tunnel, will be how all visitors reach the stones: on foot. See it for yourself with Andante Travels (01722 713800, www.andantetravels.co.uk), then write to your MP.