Who needs Center Parcs? You learn fast when you travel with kids. Lesson one came the first time I booked a hotel as a father, only to realise that sharing a room meant spending every evening joylessly trapped in silence from the moment my son fell asleep.
If a parent gets on a plane with a child under two, they age visibly by five years for every 30 minutes in the air. We had to take our pair to a family wedding in Bali two years ago, and this is why I now look and act like an year-old.
Nobody needs stress like that. Center Parcs walks a fine line very skilfully. My children exhausted themselves on a daily basis at Center Parcs. And when they did, I could just plonk them in a bike trailer and ride them around until they fell asleep. Stuart Heritage , Guardian columnist. The first time, we were all nervous and had no idea what to expect. We hired the sledges at the lower cable car station and rode up. I remember looking down from the gondola at the narrow twisting track through snowy forest.
Maddy, then 13, threw herself down on her traditional wooden sledge and went over the icy lip of the mountain. Sophie and I waited. We heard screams, mostly of joy rather than fear. We followed. It was the start of what we all agree was the best family holiday ever: sledging in Germany.
We had hired a car in Munich to get to our farmstay in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, from where we could delve into all the various toboggan runs. That year many were shut, including the famous Wallberg run, but we found plenty to enjoy. Each had its own character: Oberstaufen, our first one, had a terrifying start but was actually a pleasant jog down; Zugspitze was the highest and fastest; and our favourite was Bad Hindelang. There was a cafe near the top, then a long fast winding run through forest, with plenty of sharp corners.
