A road trip...

I really should have been the founder of lastminute.com, it's how I do things. I prefer to call it spontaneous rather than disorganised. We can always be spontaneous with the caravan if we suddenly find that we have a cricket free weekend. I can pack and be in the car in less than half an hour. So our family holidays have been in the UK and usually based where the children have had their cricket festival weeks. This year, however, we found a little gap in the cricket calendar.

So our holiday this year will be a spontaneous road trip through France to Italy, through Tuscany and as far south as Rome, perhaps. We shall see how the time goes. We've got road maps for both countries as we will be taking my car (a jeep) and it doesn't have satnav (quiet whooping of joy, I hate them!). We've booked the ferry and we've booked our first night in France, after that we will be booking the day before using an iPad, based on where we think we might end up that night. There have been a few murmurs of surprise about this method but our Italian friends (two different families) assure us this is entirely possible.

I am doing a little research. After all, we all have different requests for this holiday. Jake wants to go to an Acqua Parco. Ella wants to visit markets. I would like to swim in the sea. M wants risotto. Easily pleased aren't we?

M will be doing the lion's share of the driving and following an incident when he declared that we were all selfish passengers for not offering to drive and he always had to do the driving (the kids are 13 and 16 and I offered to drive before we set off). He is banned from saying anything like that regardless of how much his back hurts or how tired he is. I have had to order a replacement driving licence which had been lost and it came in the post extremely quickly. I'd rather admire the scenery really but in case of hip and back emergencies I thought it wise to be the back up driver.

So, after several evenings of surfing the net about all things Italian (you should hear M with his Italian language app!) I decided to dig out some green, white and red wool and crochet a small backpack. I may have to line it for it to be any use, it's a wing it and see kind of project. Failing that it could just hold all the stuff we've had to buy just to drive in France and Italy; four hi vis vests, breathalyser, warning triangle and first aid kit. Just hope we don't have to use any of it!