The thing about going on holiday with small children is that you should not go on holiday with small children. If you do go on holiday with small children, you will find yourself engaged in an arduous enterprise that a friend of mine calls “parenting with fewer resources”. So, you should probably limit your holidays to locations in which the resources are specifically kid-targeted.
What I’m trying to say is we just spent a week in Center Parcs, Co Longford. It was a week of doing lots of what my daughter calls, “actibities”. Center Parcs is a sort of tame forest in which 450-odd lodges have been built in a circle around a) a large water park called the Subtropical Swimming Paradise and b) an ersatz village square featuring shops and themed restaurants. There is also an artificial lake across which people zip line, milling their arms, eerily silent. You are sort of in nature but you are also emphatically not in nature; what you are actually in is a sort of widely-distributed modular hotel, a hotel with lots of trees in it.
Everywhere you go, in Center Parcs, you meet past, present and future versions of yourself. Here you are with slightly younger kids: your past. Here you are with slightly older kids: your future.The atomic structure varies only slightly. Around the tired, inevitable nuclei of Mum and Dad orbit posses of excited little electrons, crying, shouting, sulking, pointing at squirrels.
Our gang spends a certain amount of time pointing at squirrels. But squirrel-pointing alone does not a holiday make. We’re in Center Parcs! So, we do Center Parcs things. There is an Outdoor Activity Centre. I’ve always been more of an indoor inactivity kind of guy – the kind of guy who limits his outdoor activities to walking between one indoor location and another – but now that I’m in my 40s, I’m understanding the appeal of doing mildly strenuous things outdoors. It helps you to suppress the looming terror of death, for one thing; and so I find myself eyeing the zip line with interest. But maybe next year. This year, there is too much child-minding and child-entertaining to be done.
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Our activities have been expensively pre-booked on the basis that they might appeal to our daughter (5), and our son, who is three years old. So: Roller Tots (indoor roller skating; daughter delighted, son fell over and gave up); Mini Trek (simulated treetop walk plus zip line for kids; daughter delighted, son refused to participate), and so on. Also Big Family Quiz – your basic pub table quiz – which the kids ignored and during which the parents “had a few jars”, as we circumspectly say here in Ireland.
On Day Two we participate in something called Den Building. In a clearing in the woods, we prop logs against other logs to make a primitive little hut, while other families, with older, abler children, do the same.
As I carry a large log back to the clearing, another dad winks at me suggestively. “That’s a decent one,” he says. A peculiar incident, I feel. Is this some kind of coded message? What is happening at Den Building?
What’s happening is, of course, that Den Building is an almost parodically wholesome family activity. And this is the point of Center Parcs: it’s wholesome. It’s for kids. The very wholesomeness of Center Parcs is what invites subversive jokes. It is a place where mums and dads carefully place their no-longer-needed wilder impulses between the inverted commas of an occasional lascivious quip.
Day Three: we take the kids to something called the Off-Road Explorers. The experience very much happens on a road. The kids get into cute little jeeps and attempt to drive around a cute little track. Attempt is the operative word. My daughter crashes into a tree. “The axle’s come off,” says the nice woman who runs the Off-Road Explorers. She seems unworried, and equips my daughter with another cute little jeep.
Meanwhile, up ahead, my son is crashing his cute little jeep into a tree. After this, he crashes it into a ditch, and then, shortly after that, he crashes it into another tree. Later, he will cite the Off-Road Explorers as a highlight of the holiday. My daughter climbs out of her jeep halfway through and says, “I never want to do that again.” She looks at me carefully, apparently not trusting me to keep her out of cute little jeeps henceforth.
At dusk, post-bedtime, I go for a solitary walk along a forest path. Peace! No children screaming! Hang on: in the distance, I can hear a child screaming. In Center Parcs, there is always at least one child screaming, somewhere. But at least this time it isn’t one of mine. Feeling vaguely detoxed by the smell of pine resin and by the general mossy greenness, I go deeper into the woods. Now I can hear only birdsong and the Borg-like drone of the air conditioning and water filtration systems that keep Subtropical Swimming Paradise ticking over.
Ah, Subtropical Swimming Paradise. Viewed from without, it resembles the departures terminal of a Nordic airport, all brushed steel and swooping atrial glass. Within, however, you will find a sort of aquatic utopia. Families, families, as far as the eye can see. Observe the hirsute dad bods, as they Daniel Craig their way through the shallow wavelets. Observe the patient mums, as they huff into the clear plastic valves of a hundred inflatable ring-shaped monkeys.
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There are tubes, slides, rapids, fountains, etc. The air is damp. The tiled floor is wet. There are more human bodies than can comfortably fit in the central pool. For the adults, this is slightly panic-inducing. But the kids are amped up, joyous. “I’m the Water Queen!” my daughter sings, splashing wildly. “I’m the Queen of Center Parcs!” I note that someone, poolside, is reading Margery Forester’s biography of Michael Collins – an odd choice, vibe-wise, if you ask me.
My wife asks me if I’m going to write about “swimsuit anxiety”. “I’d say it’s determining for every woman here,” she says. Not just for the women, I think, pondering my own dad bod and wondering if perhaps I should pursue more outdoor activities. Instead, having battled the children out of their swimsuits and into their clothes, we go to another Center Parcs restaurant for lunch. Sighs, tantrums. It is Day Four.
Ostensibly there are five restaurants in the “village” but really it’s all the same restaurant wearing different hats. There is Huck’s, which is American-themed. There is Bella Italia, which is Italian-themed. There is Cara’s, the theme of which is restaurant. Across the lake there is the Pancake House, where they charge €9.95 for a kids’ serving of plain, buttered pasta.
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The food, across the board, is neither great nor terrible. It is fine. Eating in these restaurants sequentially – you are more or less obliged by the fact of being on holiday to do a restaurant crawl – it leaves you with a glutinous, over-satiated feeling. Blended with the mild cognitive impairment that accompanies the minding of small children, this feeling generates what I come to think of as the basic experiential tone of being in Center Parcs. A third element of this experiential tone: a rueful acceptance of being fleeced. Standing in the forest at dusk, listening to the noisy silence, you feel the money draining gently out of your bank account. During peak holiday season, Center Parcs Longford Forest generates gross revenue of €1.7 million a week. You too could do the same, if you charged a tenner’s worth of surplus value for 30 cents’ worth of pasta.
Looking at photos of our trip, my wife remarks, “Very wholesome content.” And that is exactly what Center Parcs offers: wholesome content. It is a vast diversionary tactic for people with kids, a pruned and comfy pseudo-excursion designed to facilitate, at mind-bending expense, family happiness.
For us, it absolutely did the trick. “I want to go back to Center Parcs,” my son says, three minutes after we leave. My daughter knows me better. “You’ve had enough of holiday now, haven’t you, Daddy?” she observes, on our final night. Of holiday, yes. But of her and her brother? Not a chance.
