4SuitcasesandaWheelchair

The Polurrian Bay Hotel  On Friday 20th July, just as the schools had broken up for summer, we decided to be a bit spontaneous and book a very last minute weekend away. We could only go for one night and didn't want to travel too far, so Cornwall seemed the perfect option. An hour and lots of searching later, we found that the Polurrian Bay Hotel near Helston had a room available. Having got a bit over excited I almost forgot to check whether the hotel was accessible. Bad news, no lift, and the only room available was on at least the first floor, if not the second. I immediately felt defeated as I couldn't see how we could do it. After talking it through with Mr S, speaking to a helpful lady on reception who had advised we could leave Miss S's wheelchair wherever convenient downstairs, and the fact there was a disabled parking bay right outside the hotel reception,  we decided to go for it and MAKE it work. This perhaps should have been our first clue that our gut

Disneyland Paris There’s no getting away from it, we are Disney fans. In fact, I would go as far as saying we are a little Disney mad. We’re not one of those families that walk around the parks in full matching Disney clobber...we haven’t taken it quite that far, but pre-kids we had a couple of visits. Once to Disneyland Paris and on another occasion we managed to get an extremely cheeky, very cheap, last minute deal out to Orlando. Mr S spent his 26 th Birthday in Magic Kingdom being sung ‘Happy Birthday’ to (VERY loudly) by a large American Disney employee…he didn’t thank me for that one! Master S has also been a little spoilt having visited both Hong Kong Disneyland and Disneyland Paris (twice!) before Miss S arrived. Master S has been a huge Mickey Mouse fan since his first trip at 9 months old!  We had managed to keep this trip a secret from the children. All our planning and booking was done in ‘code’ when they were around which they didn’t manage to crack!

I apologise in advance that this may not be the most exciting blog you’ll ever read. They’ll get better, I promise! The bad news is we didn’t find Mr Partridge on our visit to Norwich, just a ‘very fine city’ as the welcome to Norwich sign promises. If you’ll hang in there, what this is, is well, a fairly normal road trip to visit family but hopefully highlights the needs of families such as ours that don’t quite fit the ‘norm’. You could say this is our quest to find ‘normal’ perhaps? Or trying to make ‘our normal’ the norm?!  What do we expect as a family embarking on a road trip? Many hours spent sat in the car, a packet of sweets to work through, downloads of Peppa Pig and Postman Pat to entertain the kids in between the ‘I’m bored’ and ‘are we nearly there yet?’ cries. Stops for coffee, a bite to eat, stretch of the legs and using the toilet. All standard, all what you expect of a road trip with kids. What do you do however if on-route you get to the coffee shop and it’s

Over the May bank holiday weekend we headed over to Brixham with our two little pirates for some swashbuckling fun, at this years Pirate Festival.  Leaving the car park and making our way down to the marina, I understood why the area is known as the English Riviera, we could easily have just arrived in the Mediterranean! Unusually for a bank holiday in the UK, it was a lovely 20 degrees, so of course, legs, sun cream and sun hats were all out! The sun was shining brightly with barely a cloud in the sky and the sea glistened beautifully beneath it. Just stunning! We strolled through the marina down towards the harbour, soon spotting the magnificent El Galeon (Spanish pirate ship, pictured above). As we wandered, we took in the stalls selling various pirate wears, saw female pirates on stilts creating bubbles and modelling balloon swords to entertain the kids, in the family area. Passing apartments decorated with pirate skeletons dressed in costumes helped to set the s