by I remember in Dover among the white cliffs in a queue of cars that were waiting to rise the ferry to the European mainland. It doesn’t matter to dip Madeleine in lime flower tea or even the salty smell of the sea: they are exhaust damps, honestly-couple with the sight of stoic English, which eats their film-packed sandwiches next to their vehicles, which really brings the lost time back.
I did this regularly in childhood. We were too big a family to fly. With four children in tow, no budget airline was quite cheap enough, and it was still the 1980s when we started our cross-channel trips. Easyjet still had to be invented.
Every summer we pushed tent rods, sleeping bags, air beds and ourselves in the car and drove hundreds of miles from Leeds to a ferry terminal of the south coast – the necessarily unpleasant start to two weeks on a continental campsite.
It was all part of the fun, or so we were told: the long drives, the waiting, the cramped legs, then the climbing, the steep steps to the deck, the heavy diesel and metal in the air, which call each other over the low thrum of the engine.
As an adult, I forgot the ferry with its disgusting movement and smells, the poor food in canteen style, the slowness of everything. But now I am here, after all the years in the queue in Dover. This time with my own children aged eight and ten. And I feel a familiar stirring inside as the seagulls scream over the head and wait on a wide selection from the picnic.
We go to northern France – to Chantilly via Amiens – and I start to believe that this is the best way. Nostalgia has long been my election medication, although I have a safer assess the children with travel sickness.
The idea is to do the best of this piece of France not far from Great Britain, to do it directly under our noses and to wait to be explored. Almost as easy to reach as Cornwall, give or take a little sea.
Since the air prices reached astronomically and the summer temperatures in southern Europe increasingly suffocate, other British may also want to do.
The intersection with the operator Det, Det Forenede Dampskibs-Selskab (DFDS), takes 90 minutes, in which it takes me in that the ferry is a good opportunity to travel: to sit down more civilized than on a cost-effective flight, kneel under my chin.
We roll before the Picardy Burgundy for Amiens in Picardy to find a restaurant for dinner. However, the reality is that it is a lot of Sunday evening, we are in France and the options are a bit limited, even though the boulevards seem to be busy Flâneurs.
“There is an open supermarket on the other side of the street,” suggests my husband and knew that I wouldn’t do it. After the trip, I don’t want to cook in our rental apartment, which feels like a thousand stairs. (The reward for the climb is a breathtaking cathedral view from the skylight windows.)
Instead, we carry out the ritual, the slightly illuminated streets on foot, in search of the perfect brasserie, although they knew that it would certainly be closed when we stumble over it. We dedicate a full hour of this quest before I have a defeat and buy in a monoprix business in which crepes, carot salad and crispy celery swim in his creamy dressing.
The next day we start in a bar tabac around the corner. “Very authentic, very typical,” I tell the children and start my lecture. We order coffee and SiropsPlay table football and disturb the old French men who sit alone in their corners.
The Sirops Are a form of exchange with the children: you get a sugar -based drink and we can see a breathtaking Gothic gothedral of the 13th century. While we alternate to speed it up, touch every last article in the gift shop. My son buys an overpriced pencil, from which I hope that the costs for at least another 700 years will finance the care of the church.
We then take the tourist train with us and strive to hear the French audio guide while the children are happily talking about it. Although Amiens was heavily bombarded during the Second World War, it was rebuilt and is particularly pleasant on the channels in which streets of colorful houses in the Middle Ages belonged to the Weber, Dyers, Tannern and Müller.
After lunch in a creperie next to the Somme river, we go to Chantilly to determine that it is much more than whipped cream than whipped cream. The highway that leads us south cuts through endless flat levels, but when we leave it and go into the pretty Chantilly area, it falls that it bursts against fairytale charm.
When we fell down a cobblestone road, we drive to the huge Château de Chantilly and snap for air before the street leads us into a forest. Minutes later, we silence and climb the short, forested lane to the Intercontinental Chantilly Château Mont Royal, a place of neoclassical elegance that is densely surrounded by trees. As for checking in a hotel, it is very much how to discover like a magical castle.
Inside we stretch our legs after the trip, the children and my husband in the pool, and I lie on a massage table in the spa. I would argue a fair division of parental work.
Dinner is an exquisite gastronomic matter, and a memory that at least half of the coming to France is the food. The cozy hotel restaurant with its wood -related walls and the theatrical -looking bar is called Le Stradivarius in one of several allusions that the original owner of the Château was the composer Fernand Halphen. He should have it built in the early 20th century to offer his wife an “enchanting view”.
This place remains enchanting today and also calm (apart from the fact that it now contains my children). Better we will be a superlative Carrément CitronWhich translates the menu mysteriously as “lemon inspiration”. In the end I feel inspired and incredibly full.
After an equally lavish breakfast, we break the spell by going to the nearby Parc Astérix, where the calm is replaced by highly maker journeys and glaring Gauls. A joyful day is spent getting slides, luring on increased routes and turning on carousels. A day with more childhood duties – and to facilitate children without cathedrals.
But we still have to visit the castle, the Château de Chantilly, an incredible living museum that rises from 115 acres of parking land. It was designed in the French Renaissance style and houses an impressive art collection. A morning that hikes in the rooms is followed by lunch in the Courtyard Cafe of the adjacent stables, the Grandes Écuries.
From good -looking Chantilly we drive to his medieval neighbor Senlis, in the center of which every street is perfect. While the light fades, we hike in the middle of the remains of the royal castle and risk the children’s anger with a look at the emergency lady in Cathédrale, incredibly beautiful in the dark.
Of course they roll their eyes and miss the theme park. But there is still another sweetener at the end of the trip: the ferry home. I now know that it is one that I will take again.
Rosa Silverman and her family were guests Intercontinental Chantilly Chateau Mont RoyalAn IHG Hotels & Resorts ownership. Ferry crossings from Dover to Calais can be booked DFDS ferries.
