Personally, I love caravan sites anyway. The smell alone — a combination of hot caravan roof, huge stretches of newly mown grass and bacon frying in cheap frying pans — is transporting. I love running around them in the evening — lounges slowly lighting up against the cooling sky, rabbits coming out to graze, the sound of the sea in the distance. The whole site engaged in a mass rendition of the theme from EastEnders at 8pm. Every sideboard holding a jumbo-sized bottle of salad cream. They embody a very simple peace.

On the Sunday, Haven runs a two-hour Jurassic Coast Walk with local geologist Mike George. While ostensibly a fascinating explanation of why this unique stretch of coastline has been made a World Heritage Site — the multicoloured cliffs reveal more than 185 million years of geology in a single, 95-mile stretch — what it means, in reality, is the brilliant chance to pick up pebbles off the beach and go: “What does this pebble mean, Mike? Where does it come from, Mike? Mike, how do you get a stripe in a pebble, Mike?” — something you have no idea how much you want to do before you do it.

On Monday, we joined the South West Coastal Path — 200m from our caravan door! — and followed it on an easy, 90-minute walk into Exmouth. If we didn’t have my five-year-old and three-year-old stopping every five minutes to find grasshoppers or wrench wild flowers out of the hedgerows while I screamed “No! The bees need them!” we could easily have done it in half an hour. Along the path, if the tide is right, you can descend a slightly precipitous wooden staircase down to the loveliest cove: yellow sand dotted with pink sandstone rockpools, extraordinarily clear water, and a view across the bay to the serene, boat-dotted Exe estuary.

We swam in the safe water among shoals of tiny fish, before sandily walking on into Exmouth itself. Exmouth is the perfect family seaside town. The beach front has small, manageable dunes, ice-cream kiosks and a shady, non-vile amusement park of crazy golf, pitch and putt, trampolines and a pond with pedaloes shaped like giant swans.

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The town itself, meanwhile, has a top-class array of charity shops and a health food shop (B Natural Wholefoods, 14 The Strand) selling a local, organic, crusty wholemeal loaf so lovely that we had just bread and butter for lunch, three days on the trot. On the fourth day we went two doors down to the fishmongers (The Wet Plaice, 16 The Strand) and bought a pot of fresh, local crab and some whelks, and ate them in the beautifully planted Manor Gardens around the corner.

On the last night, we all went to Capone’s to get thunderously drunk once more, while MP3 sang a powerful medley from Grease (“He swam by and got my suit damp . . . Together forever like schump-ti-schump-ti-schwump do-wah-do-wah!”).

As we watched, a three-year-old boy to our left accidentally dragged a five-pint pitcher of Carling off the table and over his head. Undeterred, his mother calmly stripped him off, wiped him down with baby wipes, wrung his T-shirt and shorts out into the pitcher, and drank the salvage.

I have to say, I admire the ethos of the whole place. It really does know the meaning of both fun and value.

NEED TO KNOW

Devon Cliffs Holiday Park (01395 226226, www.havenholidays.com) has two-bedroom self-catering caravans from £249 for seven nights starting September 15 or 16. The cost includes funworks passes. Three-night breaks are available from £119.

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