Since it’s June, here is your cut-out-and-keep guide to hacking your summer holiday.
One possibility. Don’t bother. Unless you have school-age children, why book your main overseas holiday in what is the nicest part of the year at home? As my late father often reminded me: ‘The three worst things about living in Britain are January, February and March.’ If you head south in these three months, almost anywhere will be an improvement. When flying in July, you risk sitting on the tarmac at Gatwick on a perfect summer’s day destined for a place where your shoes will catch fire. And you miss out on the long, light evenings, too.
With a car you are far more likely to make a surprise discovery – a beach, a café, or even an underrated town or city
But it’s hard to generalise. After 40 years of holiday-making, I have only one firm conclusion. Holidays where you have a car are better than those where you don’t. It’s simple serendipity. With a car you are far more likely to make a surprise discovery – whether it’s a beach, a café, a restaurant or even an underrated town or city.
It is ultimately these little surprises that stick in the memory. Other modes of transport confine you to mainstream destinations, giving you little idea of how real life is lived overseas. And half the pleasure from going abroad lies in doing everyday things in a foreign place – going to a French hypermarket and stocking up on bottles of Pschitt!, for instance, thereby allowing you to enliven the rest of the holiday with increasingly infantile puns.
If you are planning to rent a car in Spain, Portugal or France (or to take your own there), I can recommend the excellent emovis-tag.co.uk – a UK website which lets you buy the little tags for your vehicle that let you use the express-pay lanes on motorways.
For two people, the Mini Cooper, preferably a convertible, is the perfect rental car: it is fun, affordable and above all small. This helps when, as inevitably happens, you find yourself misdirected by your satnav into the labyrinthine pedestrian zone of some medieval town. (‘Sauf riverains’ is French for ‘You’re lost again, you stupid Rosbif bastard’.)
If you plan to check in luggage, put an Apple AirTag, a Samsung SmartTag or some equivalent inside each of your cases. By tracking your luggage, you can reassure yourself that it has been loaded on the plane, and it will stop you panicking at the carousel when your bags are last to arrive. It will also boost your arguing position with an airline if your luggage does go missing, since you can tell them precisely where it is, rather than taking their word for it.
Always pack a four-gang UK extension lead in your luggage too. This means you only need one adapter to charge all your devices. Into one of these UK sockets, you should then plug in a UK-to-universal adapter. This means that when you arrive at the place where you’re staying, you can replug the light, TV or wifi router you have to unplug to gain access to the socket back into the power supply. It looks a mess, but it works.
Lastly, subscribe to YouTube Premium. Very few people pay for YouTube since, unlike the other streaming services, all the content is available to everyone, albeit with ads. But, trust me, it’s worth it. Premium gives you better video quality when watching on a TV. And the content is now so comprehensive that you can treat it as Wikipedia in video form. It will work in almost any country on any device, and is superb for researching what to visit when you are abroad. Can’t decide whether to drive 50 miles to visit St Juan les Arses? Just search for films made by people who have been there already.
Better still, if you are slightly on the spectrum, you can spend the whole day indoors in your gîte contentedly watching three-hour documentaries about traction engines while your spouse goes quietly insane.