Guided tours on the Tolkien trail can be booked on ellevirke. dk Nazia ParveenFamily watersports in KefaloniaWyl Menmuir and daughter on a catamaran off Kefalonia. Photograph: Wyl MenmuirOur list of demands for a family holiday grows increasingly complex. At 10 and 12, our children want more independence, they tell us, though not organised fun. They want a pool and a flat to retreat to. And then there’s what my wife, Emma, and I want. After several late nights of online research we came across Paliki Beach Club in Kefalonia, which seemed to offer it all.
One day I stopped off to fish Lough Achork, one of three loughs in the reserve, and spent a happy few hours walking forested trails in between fruitlessly casting a fly out for brown trout. At night, our rose-creepered cottage became a sanctuary in a watery world. There were stacks of Irish novels and board games, a selection of cheeses from nearby Fivemiletown Creamery on the table, a splash of whiskey in our tea.
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The success of such routes has had all sorts of bonuses: Bala Lake Railway found an original slate quarry steam locomotive from the 1880s gathering dust at a speedway track in Indianapolis and brought it home. Another was found in a swamp in Puerto Rico. Now there are heritage lines all around Wales and the country is a world leader for this wonderful aspect of industrial heritage. Kevin RushbyFar from the hedonistic crowd in SicilyCala dell’Uzzo beach, north-west Sicily. Photograph: Lee MillerIt’s the water.
We stayed in a large two-bedroom flat in the central Mitte district. The river Spree was less than a minute’s walk away. On earlier visits to Berlin, I had sampled its famous Biergartens, been rejected by doormen at its über-cool clubs and felt sobered by the history in some of its 170 museums. This time, with children, I discovered the city via its ice-cream parlours (there are more than 600) and river. The city boasts 110 miles of pristine waterways, connected by more than 1, 700 bridges. On our last day in Berlin, we took in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) museum, which takes seriously the idea of making history come alive.
Kassondra CloosMadrid, with my 70-year-old mumJamie Lafferty and his mum in La Vinoteca, Madrid. Photograph: Jamie LaffertyThe heat was a concern, but nothing compared with the prospect of my mother not enjoying my favourite European city. We were travelling as part of her 70th birthday celebrations, and my brother – also a first-time visitor to the Spanish capital – had come over from his home in the US. The pressure was enormous and it would only take one slander against the city for the whole thing to descend into an ugly brawl.
Its interactive exhibits immersed us in everyday life under the Stasi and were, despite the sombre description, as much fun as all our ice-cream stops. Lola OkolosieOff the Slovenia tourist trailLinhart Square in Radovljica, Slovenia. Photograph: AlamyLjubljana, then Lake Bled. Maybe Piran on the coast or Triglav national park. The classic tourist route around Slovenia means honeypots like Bled are heaving in high season. Visiting with a local this summer, we got to see lesser-known favourites such as Smuk restaurant and guesthouse on the rushing Tržič river, an hour from Ljubljana, and the spectacular Dovžan gorge, carved from multicoloured rock a few miles north. The best discovery, though, was small but cultured Radovljica, just off the main road to Bled, but bypassed by most. The medieval walled town sits on a high bank of the Sava river, and has the only preserved moat in Slovenia.
The real discovery, however, was Kennall Vale nature reserve. This tranquil woodland glade once housed a gunpowder factory that supplied the area’s tin mines. In the mid-1800s, Kennall Gunpowder Mills was producing up to 5, 000 barrels of gunpowder a year. The woods are dotted with rusted cogs, half-buried water wheels, skeletal mill houses and steps that lead nowhere. Thick moss, roots, rampant vines, ferns and leafy tree parasols mark the passage of time. Kennall Vale is in the wider Gwennap mining district, one of the 10 areas of the Cornish Mining world heritage site. The area’s superior granite means the vale also saw use as a quarry, and there are two black pools bound by sheer rock walls. By then, blasting techniques had moved on, and the factory closed in 1910.
Yet despite or because of the fact that we spent most of our three days gently day-drunk, things went another way. As on every trip to Madrid, the best of it was in Calle de Echegaray. Here two of the city’s, if not the world’s, best bars lie within a few minutes’ walk of each other. Salmon Guru is a painfully hip cocktail bar, all neon lights with extraordinary glasses in the shapes of things like scarab beetles and a leopard weeping blood-coloured jam. Mum thought the whole thing was preposterous fun. A few doors north, La Venencia is a serious drinking hole that bans photography, writes tabs on the bar in chalk, and only serves one drink – sherry – from five dusty casks.
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They even opted for the organised fun of guided paddleboarding, which gave Emma and me the opportunity to head out on performance boats, to blow off cobwebs spun through too many hours at our desks. Our demands may change by next year but, by luck or design, this summer we nailed it. Wyl MenmuirHistory and ice-cream in BerlinThe Oberbaum bridge over Spree in Berlin. Photograph: Christian Draghici/AlamyBerlin is famous for many things, not least its long, turbulent history and the hedonism of its nightclubs. It is not an obvious choice for a first family holiday post-pandemic. My family of four visited at Easter, when Berlin was still gripped by the tendrils of a bitter winter, and were surprised by how much our children (eight and 10) enjoyed the city.
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