A number of the hotels surrounding Heathrow Airport offer good deals on car parking. This means that should you want to park your car at Heathrow - it can be a similar cost to get a night in the hotel and parking as just parking on its own! Contact the hotels directly for further deals and details.

Hotels surrounding Heathrow airport (and other airports around the country)

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It is quicker and cheaper to prebook a town car or limo to get from the airport to downtown. Some taxi drivers charge up to $80 while a town car costs only $55.

Nightstar limos is a good one. www.nightstarlimo.com

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Having a budget that stretches about as far as the average students’ monthly wage doesn’t bode well for a luxury family holiday. Plan B, after plan A’s lottery win didn’t happen, was a driving holiday.

Having family who you can grovel to for free accommodation is always good, in our case, Freiburg in south Germany. So if you have around 2600 km and 26 hours of drive time ahead of you, perhaps the following advice may help.

Driving can be the fun, as well as the thrifty option, honestly! There’s loads of fun to be had at motorway service stations. A particularly memorable one in Luxembourg comes to mind, where the kids play area was something you would pay admission fees for in the UK.

Another quickly forgotten tip is: never buy food at these service stations. Families easily fall prey to the brightly illuminated boards advertising stuff. Although, after nine hours of cous cous and boiled eggs, we too were finally beaten into submission by our five year old to buy some chips from a dancing hot dog in Belgium.

Pit-stop fun aside the majority of your time will be spent shackled to your metallic friend with the constant whine of your kids in the back. Try to see this enforced confinement as a positive way to interact with each other. Who knew games such as ‘100 things we hate about driving to Germany’ or the more upbeat ‘Sausage types to eat whilst in Germany’, could be so much fun. Obviously more traditional games can be relied upon, ‘I Spy’, ‘A-Z of… almost anything’ and the little known ‘How fast is ‘that’ car?’ (Which undoubtedly, as the title suggests, is infinitely better than ours).

Listening to audio CD’s was a viable alternative, but only buying one story proved a false economy; you can only listen to ‘Five Go Crazy at Smuggler’s Creek’ a couple of times before you start tearing your hair out.

Get your kids to appreciate the value of money by encouraging them to look out for the cheapest prices for fuel along the way. Don’t, however, imagine that the next fuel stop will be the cheapest and try to wing it on fumes. This always ends in tears.

In-car entertainment is not over-rated and don’t naively presume that your family will transform into The Waltons during the trip. Our budget didn’t allow for hand held DVD players and the like, but pack as much ‘play’ stuff as you can safely squeeze in.

Probably the best tip I can offer on this score would be to give the kids a flexible window sun shield and get them to bend and twist it into a small shape. Respite time for you – up to 1 hour.

And finally, when you are just about at the end of your tether and can barely take no more, be ‘pretendy’ happy. Doing this is sometimes more fun than actually being happy for real. Say ‘yes’ to all your kids requests, give lots of false smiles, laugh ridiculously loud and tell stupid jokes to convince yourself that you may actually still be enjoying the journey. This delirious state may only last, at most, ten minutes before you slump back into your seat, look at the map and realise there is still 250 km to go.

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A very interesting article about driving to Greece by car. If you plan a driving holiday to Greece read it.

www.in2greece.com/blog/2007/09/england-to-greece-by-car.html

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Four-wheel drive vehicles with optional ski racks can be rented by the day or week from RuggedRental.com (approximately $550 per week for a Jeep Grand Cherokee). They will pick your party up at the airport, and within two hours you can be skiing in the finest powder conditions to be found anywhere in the world.

www.ruggedrental.com

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Another reader recommended hiring a car to see the main sights and I couldn't agree more. However, we did find that even in summer the quality of the road surfaces was very variable. The Icelanders tend to resurface their roads by throwing down a load of hardcore and then working the whole width of the road, which means you have to drive over the top! Our Toyota Corolla sustained quite severe damage from landing on its nose while following a bulldozer... So get a 4x4, even if you would normally never be seen dead near one, it gives you more options and peace of mind.

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