Travelling with teens

Going on holiday with teens is a bit of a rollercoaster. First of all, they find it very difficult to get up early and we always leave at around 5am. Whereas when they were younger they would get up two hours early, full of excitement, you now have to literally drag them from their beds and they spend the whole journey asleep or asking you to play BTS songs on a loop.

Then there are the mood swings, most of which are linked to wifi access.Several people seem to have developed charger issues en route from Calais. Someone sat on a charger, but we managed to bend it back into workable mode. One charger cable stopped working altogether and we only have three adaptors, which, in a family of six, is three adaptors too little. Every time I have tried to charge my phone, someone seems to have disconnected it and put their own phone on to charge.

The other problem is that more than half of the teen squad are vegan, which can present difficulties when you are on the move. Apparently, Pepsi Max is strained through fish gut or some such…We had bought a big tub of hummus, however, and that has been lunch for several days.

The good news is that our destination has wifi. The bad news is that only son and daughter one were supposed to share a bed. That arrangement didn’t last long. Only son moves a lot and daughter one likes space. Only son found a cot mattress and installed himself at the foot of our bed, claiming daughter one had been poking him.

The journey down through France was full of amazing scenery, including lots of sunflower fields and the Massif Central where only son was on bear alert. We are now in Perpignan with a view of the Pyrenees on one side and the Mediterranean on the other. Family in Spain are only a couple of hours’ drive away.

Only son has been jumping in the waves all day and tends to drift further and further down the beach, refusing to get out ever. Daughter one refuses to go in the water at all. Families, as I keep telling them, are all about compromise. One day we do beach, the day after we get phone chargers and do historic sites. Everyone wins.

Sometimes everyone does come together in a spirit of cooperation. Only son’s shoes were rubbing and daughter two agreed to wear them. They are two sizes too small for her, but she hobbled 20 minutes back from the beach in them while he wore my flip flops which I had lent to daughter two because she had forgotten to pack hers…

We’ve got beans, we’ve got vegan cheese and even though we don’t have a tin opener and had to break into the beans with scissors, everyone is feeling fairly relaxed and more or less getting on.

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