Sarah Beeny Reports on A Brownhills Motor Home

A month driving through Europe, six children, four adults and two motorhomes all added up to a near-perfect holiday for Sarah Beeny and her extended family.

Holidays should consist of white, sandy beaches, coral reefs and tables laden with fruit and lobster while you sit casually sipping cocktails and topping up a cracking suntan… shouldn’t they?

Not mine – I would so love to say it is because I support the UK holiday industry, or believe in the British summer, but even claiming my plan was to save the planet for future generations by not flying wouldn’t be true. The reason is simply because getting my husband onto a plane is worse than pulling teeth. I have managed it once or twice and the flight itself actually was not too bad – but the week before and the entire time away was painful in the extreme. If we spent too long in the state of “about to get onto a plane together” we would certainly be divorced. So I roll over and our holidays consist of driving – driving to France, driving to Italy, driving to Spain…

Last year, though, I thought: enough. Let’s embrace the whole “non-flying thing” and stop whinging. If we are going to drive, then let’s drive in style, and at the same time, perhaps I can shoehorn my childhood camping fantasies into the holiday.

The idea took hold with a trip to Brownhills, Britain’s leading motorhomes company. Once you visit their website, and see the hundreds of different varieties of homes-on-wheels on offer, it is impossible not to be overcome by an overwhelming thirst for the road. So, it was settled. We would travel by motorhome with my brother and his family for a month.

Unlikely as it may sound, the combination of a month on the road, six children, four adults, a couple of motorhomes and Eastern Europe actually made a pretty good holiday cocktail. The children didn’t outnumber the adults as badly as the Von Trapp family, but we were certainly in less control than the lovely Maria. Having a pair of motorhomes helped, however, if only to contain them. The first carried my husband and me, plus our one- and three-year-olds; the second housed my brother, his wife and children aged one, three, seven and eight.

Clearly my brother and his wife had a slightly trickier time than we did – especially as we had a brand new motorhome called Swift Kontiki, the mother and father of luxury in motorhomes, with a circular bed in separate bedroom at one end. They had a Hymer, mainly because the Kontiki didn’t have four seatbelts in the back. The Hymer was also much shorter, which was an advantage when driving – but it didn’t attract the envious eyes of campsite neighbours in quite the same way.

Anyone who has tried to amalgamate holidays and children will know that they are not necessarily a match made in heaven. But especially so for us, as driving means that most holidays are topped and tailed with painful on-road experiences.

A home-on-wheels solves that problem. Equally, although you many not have the luxury of a hotel, you don’t have the trauma of having to plough your way through the minibar in the bathroom because your children are asleep in the bedroom. Ideally we would have had good weather (it turned out to be one of the wettest summers in history) – as all my plans had involved lounging in deckchairs listening to crickets rather than torrential rain on the roof – but I can’t tell you how many times we thanked our lucky stars we were not under canvas.

Otherwise, the greatest thing about motorhoming is how free you are – you don’t have to plan ahead: you just go where you want, when you want. Just park up, pile out and explore. As a result, we discovered and visited places I knew almost nothing about.

Our first stop was a Belgian campsite near Charleroi in a place called Oteppe. Here, for the first time, I