Six weeks. Two of us working part time. Two children who, by the second Tuesday, had exhausted every idea either of us had.
We started the holidays with a list of proper days out, and we ended it having worked out something slightly annoying about our own children.
The £46 day
I’m not going to name it because it isn’t the venue’s fault. Four hours away in total, a car park charge, a queue for the thing they most wanted to do, and an exit routed through a shop.
It was fine. Genuinely fine. Nell had a good time for about three of the four hours.
And then hour four happened, which it did because we had paid forty-six pounds and I was determined to have all of the day. She was tired, Rowan was past it, and it ended at a display of plastic figurines with a conversation that both of us handled badly.
Driving home I did the thing where you tot up what a day cost and divide it by how good it was.
The river
Two days later, because it was hot and nobody had a plan, we went to a bit of river about twenty minutes away where the water runs over a flat rock and there is a shallow pool about a foot deep.
Four and a half hours. Nobody asked to leave. Rowan sat in six inches of water doing something with stones for a period of time I can only describe as geological.
Cost: nothing, plus petrol, plus a bag of sandwiches. The most expensive thing we did all summer was one night in a field, and that was thirty pounds.
I don’t want to draw a big conclusion from one afternoon, so I’ll say it carefully: over six weeks, the days our children talked about afterwards were overwhelmingly the free ones, and it was not close.
Water, specifically
Anything they are allowed to get into.
A stream, a beach at low tide, the shallow end of anything. It holds them longer than anything built to hold them, and there is no queue and no exit through a shop and no point at which somebody has to say no to a five-pound windmill.
Second best is a wood with fallen trees in it. Third is a big hill. Fourth, and I want this recorded because it is true, is a building site visible from a public footpath, which Rowan would choose over any of the above.
Leaving early
This is the thing I’d actually pass on.
Leave while it’s still good. Two hours of a genuinely nice time beats three hours with a bad twenty minutes at the end, because the bad twenty minutes is what gets remembered and what gets talked about in the car.
Paying makes this much harder, which is most of the case against paying. Nobody has ever felt they needed to extract full value from a river.
The food
Take it. All of it — the same bag we take in the car.
Almost every pound we spent on days out that summer was spent on eating in the place we had gone to, at prices that exist because you can’t easily leave. Sandwiches, a flask, fruit cut up in a box, and a bag for the rubbish.
It also removes the one o’clock queue, which is the actual hazard — everybody in the building is hungry at the same time and there are eleven people in front of you and a three-year-old at the end of his resources.
The annual pass
Bought in April, full of intent. Used three times.
Worked out at more per visit than the day tickets would have been, and I know this because I did the sum, in the car, in November, and then did not mention it to anybody until now.
Things people email to ask
- What are the best free days out with young children?
- Anywhere with water they are allowed to get into. A stream, a beach at low tide, a paddling area — it holds children far longer than anything designed to, costs nothing, and does not have an exit through a shop. After water, in our experience: a wood with fallen trees, a big hill, and any building site visible from a public path.
- Why do expensive days out go wrong?
- Because paying makes you stay too long. A ticket that cost forty-six pounds creates pressure to extract forty-six pounds of value, so you stay past the point where everybody is tired, and the last hour poisons the memory of the first three. The days that worked best for us ended while everyone was still enjoying themselves, which felt wasteful and was not.
- Are annual passes worth it for a family?
- Only if you already go somewhere often, not if you are hoping to. Ours was bought in April with real enthusiasm and used three times, which worked out at more per visit than day tickets. The honest test is how many times you went in the twelve months before you bought it, not how many you intend to go now.
- How do you keep the cost of days out down?
- Take the food. Almost all of the money on a day out goes on eating in the place you are visiting, at prices set by the fact that you cannot easily leave. A bag of sandwiches, a flask and cut fruit removes the largest single cost and, incidentally, removes the queue at one o’clock when everybody is hungry at the same time.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
Trains with two, and why we still do it
The train to my sister’s costs more than the petrol and takes twenty minutes longer, and we do it anyway, because two hours in a car and two hours on a train are not the same two hours for anybody involved.
Pocket money, and the three systems we tried
A pound a week, paid on a Saturday, not linked to anything. We got there after two more complicated systems, one of which taught our six-year-old that kindness has a price of twenty pence.
The year we all put in, and how badly I handled it
Pooling for one present is obviously sensible and everybody says so. Nobody mentions that it means three siblings and their partners having an explicit conversation about money, which our family had successfully avoided for about twenty years.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
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