Dispatches

The idea of this half-term mini-break was a ’lads and dads’ bonding trip, and Dylan and I had chosen to return to the canals and locks of England having enjoyed it so much in July, this time inviting my friend Gareth and his son Robert to accompany us. And so we found ourselves flying into Birmingham on a blustery late-October afternoon, taking a short Uber ride to Alvechurch Marina on the Worcester & Birmingham Canal, and boarding the Common Swift, our 50ft narrowboat home for the next four nights. ...

Our final stop on the summer’s travels was the only campsite we hadn’t pre-planned, and choosing it reminded us of why we’ve been planning our summers ahead of time recently: You fall into the trap of endlessly swiping on phones for the ‘perfect’ next place to stay, while not enjoying the one you’re at! The irony this time was that when I finally located a site somewhere on the way home that seemed to suit, Faye said, ‘I’m sure we’ve been to that one before.’ I was adamant we hadn’t, because the only site the photos reminded me of was in Portugal, or so I thought - but no, Faye was right, and we had indeed visited this site, four years ago. The good news was that we loved it back then, so we had high hopes. ...

UK heatwave! The mercury rose rapidly as we left the Lake District for the trip down south to spend a night down at my Dad’s in Bracknell, arriving mid-afternoon in broad sunshine. We spent the evening sat in the garden catching up, before a wonderful, huge dinner with chicken and potatoes plus multiple home-made dessert options (chocolate cake! tiramisu! lemon drizzle cake!). We certainly felt looked after, with stepmum Christine’s Irish family feeding instinct kicking in. ...

We wanted to show the kids The Lake District, so we left relaxed Seahouses and headed west, noting the proximity of Hadrian’s Wall just to our north for much of the journey, and the change from fields and trees to more rugged moorland as we drew closer, finally negotiating some narrow country roads to drop down to Bowness. I had drunk one too many coffees that morning, judging by the number of times I had to stop for a ‘can’t wait’ toilet break, too; turns out there are few service stations on the A-roads across the top of the country, so it’s just as well I can do roadsides! ...

Time to show the kids the Great British Seaside. Seahouses is a small, out-of-the-way fishing village and seaside escape just north of Newcastle, that you get to from the A1 through miles of fields, and that has endless windswept beaches with fine sand, low rock formations, grassy dunes, and - away from the campsite, car parks and independent shops - few people. We got there via a quick lunch stopover at the Scotts Arms near to Wetherby Bridge, where we met up with fellow campers Roy and Lynda who were also joining us on the trip in their motorhome. From there it was past the Angel of the North (singularly unimpressive from our bit of the motorway, I have to say, mainly hidden behind trees), and cross-country to reach Seahouses and the breezy, spacious Seafield Park campsite right on the beach and just a minute’s walk from the little town centre. ...

Maya’s birthday weekend and we’d promised her something special, so we took her to Center Parcs in Woburn Forest with a gang of family in tow. We went via a phone shop to get a UK data SIM card for the router (onboard WiFi being essential for family unity, of course) and we also stopped for a really good pub lunch close to the site at The Woburn, a huge but tasteful hotel/bar/restaurant, right at the heart of its village. ...

Cruising the canals at the walking pace of a narrowboat feels like stepping back in time, into a parallel world that intertwines with the bustle of real life but manages to feel distant from it at the same time. We’ve hired a narrowboat for a week, from Worcester Marina. Setting off by road from Southampton just before midday and after seemingly continuous roadworks, diversions, questionable GPS routing decisions and traffic jams, we rolled in at 4pm, just within the boat handover deadline. Some of the country roads we’d followed to avoid the literally closed actual route were tight single file, and it was all rather hairy, including a memorable near miss with a speeding red BMW coming the other way. ...

Confession time: We willingly went straight to Burger King this time on our onward journey. Do not pass ‘go’, do not collect £200. At least we ate at lunchtime for once on a travel day. In brighter news, the countryside went from the plains of Spain to much more interesting gnarly rocks then mountains, tunnels, lots of meadows and woods, and before we knew it we were descending into our final night’s stay in Spain, at Laredo. ...

Setting off from Nazaré we realised that by the time we reached the nice restaurant Faye had found for lunch in Spain, it would actually be an hour later than our already tight timings, as we’d forgotten about the change of time zone. So we went on the old ‘Morse family lookout’ for somewhere suitable to eat, involving leaving the motorway at towns that time and beauty had forgotten, and calling into motorway service stations where ‘restaurants’ were literally closed/boarded up. We eventually ended up at the Burger King in Salamanca at 4.20pm. Poor. ...

Temperatures were all over the place on today’s journey from Porto Covo up the coast to Nazaré, a fishing town and resort between Lisbon and Porto. A warmish morning on the coast led to sweltering inland weather into the mid-30s by the time we sat down for a (very poor) service station lunch. Arriving later at Nazaré, we were a full 15 degrees cooler, with a sharp wind and overcast skies greeting us as we set up the van in the pine trees of Ohai Outdoor Resort. Kept it interesting! Driving in, one thing was certain: The place has changed quite a bit from the out-of-the way, sleepy fishing town I first trudged to on foot with my friends on a post-uni European backpacking trip 34 years ago. Funny, that… ...