I did a UK family road trip on a shoestring. Here’s what I learned

The miner shows off his daughter’s favourite doll. On closer inspection, it’s an old shoe, dressed in tattered rags. It is, my kids decide, not a patch on the Nintendo Switch.

This encounter at the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley, 17 kilometres west of Birmingham, is a useful reminder of the need to make do on a limited budget. We’re attempting a family holiday in the UK as it would traditionally be done in Australia – packing everything into the car and hopping between wallet-friendly holiday parks.

Self-catering, cabins and caravans, the theory goes, leave more money to do the fun stuff. If listening to a costumed volunteer explain how a miner would have to sleep in a room with his wife and six children can be classified as fun, that is.

The Black Country Living Museum is impressive in scale – dozens of buildings including schools and shops have been rebuilt, vintage buses and horse-drawn carts rumble through the streets, while activities include Charleston dance classes and trips down the mine.

This time-warp sprawl, predictably, doesn’t generate quite as much young enthusiasm as the next itinerary-padder, Cadbury World. Birmingham’s family favourite has 4D rides as well as exhibitions on the history of chocolate, a factory tour and prodigious levels of chocolate-tasting.

The social history – the southern suburb of Bourneville where the attraction stands was built by the Cadbury company to house the factory workers – is fascinating. But it’s more of interest to parents who have long since conceded that tonight’s dinner is just going to be the remainder of the chocolate haul.

The first overnight stop on our journey through parts of England in which I’ve spent disgracefully little time before is one of the wooden lodges at Warwick Castle. It comes with bunk beds, easy access to the castle the next day and – more importantly – an evening sword skills training lesson.

Alas, that means that everything in the back of the car is a sword to be fought with on the 2½-hour drive to our second stop, Brean on the Somerset coast.

One of the advantages of a road trip, though, is that you can stop in big cities on the way without having to pay big-city accommodation prices. Most of our driving day, therefore, is spent in Bristol. Here, the SS Great Britain is ripe for exploration, with our girls nosying around the faithfully restored staff quarters of what was once the biggest passenger ship in the world.

The grand museum ship sparks imagination, but not as emphatically as We The Curious. This fantastic, highly interactive science museum is themed around questions such as “who was the first person to see sand?” and “why do rainbows make people happy?”

The girls are reluctant to stop firing foam balls in the air, creating animations and completing morality tests in a driving simulator, but we have to get to our home for the next few days.

The Unity Beach holiday park is, in many ways, a slice of traditional British coastal life. Rows and rows of static caravans sprawl over what is essentially a village in its own right. Inside the surprisingly fresh-looking caravan, everything’s a bit of a squash, but the girls get tiny separate rooms and the kitchen is solidly passable for cooking in.

What’s not traditional is the water park, which provides temporary parental respite while the girls merrily whizz down slides.

When the girls can be dragged away from the Turbo Drop and Disco Slide, Somerset’s charms lie inland. There’s a serenity to walking in the Mendip Hills that gives way to shamelessly touristy – but highly picturesque – Cheddar Gorge.

Here, the girls are taught how to make fire at the Museum of Prehistory, entranced by the cathedral-like formations of Gough’s Cave, and happily fill up with cheese at the Cheddar Gorge Cheese Company.

A fair few blocks of that cheese come with us as we make our way south into Cornwall, stopping to see some otters on the way.

Many live wild in the rivers of Dartmoor National Park, but the families at Dartmoor Otters and Buckfast Butterflies in Buckfastleigh, Devon, have been rescued. We arrive just in time for feeding, and my daughters’ hearts melt instantly. No, we can’t take an otter home with us. Sorry.

In Cornwall, we stay at Killigarth Manor, a somewhat hilly holiday park between the outrageously pretty villages of Polperro and Looe. It comes with a kids’ entertainer that our children aren’t remotely interested in, plus a pool and a ping-pong table that they want to monopolise.

On the first night, we park at the top of Polperro, then walk along the snaking main path past pubs and craft shops down to the harbour. Despite many Cornish villages being sacrificed entirely to tourism, there’s a residual higgledy-piggledyness here, with cottages occupied either by artists or fishermen.

At the harbour, the fishing fleet is moored, ready to head out again in the morning.

Cornwall has a few big headline attractions, notably the architecturally dazzling indoor rainforest at the Eden Project and castle-topped island, St Michael’s Mount. But we find the charm comes in gentle exploration, getting stuck behind tractors on terrifyingly narrow country lanes and demolishing picnics on beachside benches.

Many of Cornwall’s beaches are dainty coves, reached by paths zig-zagging down from the neighbouring clifftops. But Perranporth is a mightier beast, starting with a stream threading into the Atlantic Ocean and widening to a generous landscape of gold-brown sand. There’s a memorial bench dedicated to Winston Graham, author of the Poldark novels, which were set around Perranporth.

Graham’s ruggedly rural world has long gone, though. Perranporth is a buzzy place of bars, coffee shops and surf schools.

Alas, any thoughts of donning wetsuits and learning to ride a board are thwarted. The Atlantic Ocean is not so much sending surf towards the beach as launching towering walls of foaming white water. It’s mesmerising to look at, but marmalising to swim into.

Amid all the meandering, sandcastle-making and superhuman levels of ice-cream consumption, I have a mission to complete in Cornwall. My gnawing need to visit Britain’s southernmost point kicks in, and I throw out the offer of a chocolate factory and seal sanctuary on the way back to win the rest of the team round.

As it turns out, Lizard Point is worth visiting even without the tick-box factor. The cliffs are steep and chiselled, and the ocean washes over rocky outcrops, creating what looks like a series of wedding cakes. Whip the binoculars out, and there’s a good chance of spotting dolphins in the water and seals scuffling on the rocks.

There’s a suitable edge-of-the-Earth vibe and, in keeping with the frugal nature of the trip, it doesn’t cost a penny to enjoy. The girls aren’t fussed about the budget, though – they’re too busy running down the hill, past the lifeboat station, to the beach.

The details

Fly
Emirates offers one-stop flights from Sydney and Melbourne to Birmingham, via Dubai. See emirates.com

Stay
There are scores of holiday parks around the UK, with Hoseasons the best starting place for picking the right ones. Rates drop dramatically outside of British school holidays which, handily, are usually at different times to Australian school holidays. See hoseasons.co.uk

Warwick Castle Woodland Lodges from £119 ($242.50) a night, including breakfast. See warwick-castle.com

Unity Beach, Somerset, caravans from £199 ($406) for four nights, self-catering. See hru.co.uk

Killigarth Manor, Cornwall, caravans from £110 ($224) for four nights, self-catering. See johnfowlerholidays.com

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