Between 1974 and 1979, all of our family summer holidays were spent on camp
sites in France. Looking back, this was probably driven less by a love of
the open air than by economic necessity. None of us was a natural-born
camper.
One of my most enduring memories is of standing beside a busy road,
juggernauts screaming past, as my mother fished out a Calor Gas stove from
the back of the Datsun and boiled water for Pot Noodles. There were good
times, too, but it’s the bad ones that stick in the mind: squabbling over
the correct way to put up a tent; the storm in Brittany that flooded the
whole camp site.
Since then, apart from a few years of backpacking and one waterlogged
Glastonbury, it’s been hotels all the way. But a funny thing happened last
summer — I started thinking again, at the age of 39, that camping might be
fun. This had a lot to do with the fact that my son Callum had just turned
eight. He had recently acquired a sleeping bag and found this piece of kit
so enthralling that he would sneak out of bed at night and camp out on his
bedroom floor. To deny him a taste of the real thing (in a tent! ... on
grass! ... with a torch!) seemed almost cruel.
Curiously, others had been thinking on similar lines. Three sets of friends,
independently of each other, had recently bought tents and taken their first
camping trips in years. And the evidence wasn’t just anecdotal: Millets,
which has more than 200 high-street stores, had reported a surge in sales of
family camping equipment.
Tour operators offering family camping trips were also doing well. One of
them, Explore, had a week of canoeing, cycling and camping in the Dordogne.
Callum and I eyed up the brochure. There were pictures of grinning kids
paddling on the river, and — for the grown-ups — “ample opportunities to
enjoy the regional delicacies ... black truffle, foie gras and game”. The
minimum age was eight, and there were two spare places on the next
departure. We were sold.
We arrived by train: Eurostar to Paris, then four hours down to Brive. Ten
minutes from our final destination, something horrible happened: the clouds
blackened and rain streaked the carriage windows. By the time we got off,
dragging four hefty bags behind us, it was tipping down.
Stupidly, I had trusted the weather forecast, which had promised five days of
unbroken sunshine, and not bothered to pack waterproofs. “Don’t worry, it’ll
pass,” I told Callum, when really I was thinking, “Camping! You complete
idiot, Hodson.” By the time we reached our camp site beside the Dordogne at
Beaulieu it was almost dark, but at least the rain had stopped, and our tour
leader, Penny, had put up all the tents.
We unfolded some stools, uncorked some wine and sheepishly introduced
ourselves. There were eight adults and seven children in the group,
including an outdoorsy South African family, a widow from Cheshire and her
two teenagers, a divorced vet with his eight-year-old son, and an airline
pilot from Dublin with his girlfriend and 11-year-old daughter. They seemed
a nice bunch.
After dinner at a nearby creperie, we crawled into our respective tents.
Callum was caught on the cusp between excitement and exhaustion; within two
minutes he was snoring gustily. I lay for a while listening as the coughs
and whispers subsided, then dozed off to dream of an all-white hotel room
with a huge bathroom. At 7am we woke, pulled on some clothes and emerged to
find shafts of sunlight slicing through the treetops, burning off a thin
layer of mist. What the previous day had been a wet field was now an Elysian
vision.
AT BREAKFAST time, it became clear that camping meant mucking in. The child-
ren were dispatched to fetch croissants, and Penny produced a washing-up
rota for the adults. We were given a map of the town and told to buy
groceries for a picnic lunch. On our return, we took down our tents and
loaded them onto a trailer that would be waiting at our next camp site.
Then came the serious business of the day: canoeing. After a safety briefing
and a quick lesson in paddling (harder than it looks), we wandered down to
the riverbank and climbed into our boats; not orthodox canoes but long
inflatables, which are slower but more stable.
The river was surprisingly brisk and we made good progress, negotiating some
gentle rapids and looking out over cornfields, clumps of oak trees and a few
isolated farmhouses. The toughest part was persuading Callum that it wasn’t
a race. “I know that, Dad,” he replied. “But I still don’t want us to come
last.”
After three hours of paddling, we reached Puybrun, where we pitched up at a
quiet riverside camp site with clean, hot showers, a pool, a bar, a
restaurant and lots of grassy play areas. While the kids made a beeline for
the pool, the adults put up the tents, then guzzled wine in the
late-afternoon sun. In the evening, we sat out on the terrace outside the
restaurant and I ate the best meal I’ve ever had on a camp site: a tuna
flan, magrets de canard with apples, cream sauce and rösti,
and a bottle of Bordeaux.
That night, I slept so soundly that even a violent storm failed to wake me. We
unzipped at 8am to find the tents lashed with rain, debris strewn across the
site and a large oak tree split in two, part of its fallen trunk having
narrowly missed a caravan. It was still drizzling when, after breakfast, we
took delivery of our bikes and set off down narrow country lanes, past
fields of tobacco and asparagus, to the dramatic hilltop castle of
Castelnau-Bretenoux.
Under clearing skies, we walked around the castle, learning some juicy facts
about the Hundred Years’ war involving death and defecation (the tops of the
towers, we learnt, had doubled as latrines). We freewheeled down to the
village of Bretenoux and found a cafe on the square, filled with workmen in
overalls. I ordered the menu du jour: charcuterie, sausage and
vegetables, a groaning cheeseboard and a quarter of a litre of wine all for
£8.
THE ITINERARY was well thought out. There was another day of cycling, two more
days on the river and a visit to the caves at Padirac and the pilg- rimage
town of Rocamadour, which made for a nice change of pace.
The business of camping took up a great deal of time: we moved five times in
seven days, so we seemed to be forever taking down and putting up the tents,
unloading and reloading the trailer, hanging out clothes to dry and packing
them away again. Living outdoors also stripped us of our privacy and made
our moods (well, mine, at least) utterly dependent on the weather. It was —
forgive the pun — an intense experience.
The highs were very high. One day was so hot that we cooled off by swimming in
the river, then played volleyball — boys against girls — until it was too
dark to see the ball. Another evening, we had dinner at a fabulous village
restaurant, all sitting together on one long table like a huge extended
family, then we walked home by torchlight under a canopy of stars.
By day five, all my clothes felt damp and our standards of personal hygiene
had plummeted. I was fishing clothes out of the dirty pile and creating a
new “clean enough” pile. Callum was covered in scratches, bruises and deeply
ingrained dirt. I couldn’t recall seeing him so happy.
Most of the other highlights involved food and wine. There was a smart hotel
dining room in Carennac where the two of us arrived for lunch in cycling
gear and were treated like VIPs. Only when I went to the loo did I realise
my face was streaked with mud. Best of all was the little ferme auberge
(farm inn) in Lacave, where a sensational five-course set dinner cost less
than £10 per head. Callum was sick that evening, and we got lost as we
walked home in the dark, but I shall always remember it for the home-made
foie gras, the goat’s cheese salad and the potato galette (pancake).
Some holidays whizz past so effortlessly that you can’t believe it’s time to
go home. This one, however, was so full of incident, effort and emotion that
I felt as though we had been away for a month. For Callum, it had been a
true adventure; for me, a reminder of simple pleasures; for both of us, it
was a time of real intimacy. And few things in life are more pleasurable,
after a week of sleeping in a tent, than rediscovering your own bed.
Travel brief
The Dordogne Adventure costs £450, including local payments and breakfast and
train travel from London (ages 8-11, £405) with Explore (0870 333 4001,
www.explore.co.uk/familyadventures). There are very few places still
available this summer; prices for 2006 have yet to be confirmed.
Acorn Family Adventure (0800 074 5149, www.acorn-adventure.com) features
France, Italy, Wales and the Lake District. Eight nights in the Ardèche cost
£419pp based on four sharing, this includes car ferry, meals and activities.
PGL Travel (0870 050 7507, www.pgl.co.uk) has short camping trips at Boreatton
Park, a camp site near Shrewsbury that has tents with beds and flooring.
Four nights over the August bank holiday cost £129 (under-18s £105, 2- to
5-year-olds £79, babies free), including activities.
Exodus (0870 240 5550, www.exodus.co.uk) has a 13-day family tour of the
American west that includes six nights’ camping in the course of visits to
the Grand Canyon, Lake Powell, Las Vegas and Moab, starting from £1,473
(children £1,257), plus a local payment of £115pp, including flights. The
minimum age is eight.
