Most parents of young children spend their holidays, if they take any at all, in campsites or child-proof rented houses, staying put for two weeks and relaxing, insofar as relaxation is possible. This is what my wife and I fully intended to do this year.
Instead, due to an oversight on my part (failing to plan anything) we spent a fortnight touring France by train and staying in hotels.
This sort of travelling can be hard on your (a) nerves and (b) credit card: both of which, in my case, were close to their limits after the first week. But on the plus side I am now an expert on France's rail system, especially the excellent Trains de Grand Vitesse (literally "trains with big ticket prices") network. And the other consolation is that, thanks to the fact that one of our children is a two-year-old boy, we saved a lot on restaurant bills.
As many of you will know, you cannot bring a two-year-old boy into, or anywhere near, a restaurant of any kind. Based on our experience with Patrick's sister, Roisin, now a sophisticated three-year-old, we thought it might be safe enough to dine outside restaurants, common practice on the Continent. But the little precautions you have to take with a boy - removing all potentially dangerous objects from the table, such as glasses, cutlery, the tablecloth, etc. - make you unpopular with waiters. And even if you can ignore this, the constant tension saps your will after a while.
It's true that, whenever we tried it, Patrick added a sense of risk and adventure otherwise missing from the 85-franc tourist menu. But the fear of what he might do next made it difficult to digest food, assuming you could get your hands free long enough to eat any.
So we ended up having a lot of picnics in the park. This is not without its social pressures: French parks are tidier than many Irish restaurants (and the ducks will only eat your bread if you bought it fresh that morning in an approved boulangerie), but they are relatively relaxing places to eat with infants. In fact, one of our best picnics was in the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre in Lyon. And, as a tip for parents travelling in Europe, I would say that Roman ruins are always a good option. The damage our kids did in that amphitheatre was barely noticeable.
You see a lot of parks when travelling with children, and not much else. We stayed in Avignon, for example, where the town is dominated by the huge papal palace, seat of the anti-popes during the Great Schism that began in 1378. The competing pontiffs in Avignon and Rome faced a third claimant after the Council of Pisa elected its own pope in 1409, and the papacy was becoming as devalued as a world boxing title until Martin V won a reunification bout in 1417.
None of which I learned in Avignon, because we never quite reached the palace. But I can report that the town has good parks, with all the requisites for children: slides, see-saws, sand-pits, and of course the gravel that small boys need to throw at pigeons.
The other good thing about Avignon is that we met a couple there, Seβn and Estelle, who had children of similar ages and were also touring France by train. This was a great relief to us. Admittedly, their planning was a little better than ours, in that both their children were female. But we had a long conversation about our experiences, comparing parks, discussing the need for a good travel guide for parents ("France on Under Five Nappies a Day"), and agreeing that the trains were great, but that next year we really must rent a house.
Travelling this way has its stresses, as I say. The only thing more reliable than the TGV, we found, was that Roisin would announce she needed to do a "wee-wee" every three minutes.
And each new hotel room had to be modified for safety. From experience, the first thing we did was take all the objects that were either breakable or had sharp edges and put them on top of the wardrobe. Lamps, vases, antique furniture - anything smaller than the wardrobe, in fact.
But you do at least see the country. Our favourite place was Arles, a charming town with magnificent Roman ruins: including, in the ancient forum, a couple of free-standing columns 2,000 years old. Planning to have lunch there one day, we overheard a guide telling tourists that the authorities often considered erecting a support structure, but rejected this on the grounds that the columns had lasted this long on their own. We decided not to push our luck, and took the kids to a restaurant instead.
fmcnally@irish-times.ie
