Ways to ski in UK snow

This blog is about low-carbon family travel. Will it or won't it snow this year? With  Facebook friends publishing endless pix of far away spots where the snow is falling (from Serbia to Sheffield) how do you guarantee kids can have a taste of  Christmas holiday snow when it's not snowing where you are? Here Nicola Baird tries out snow in a snow dome.

Did the picture on the side wall fool you? It's easy to imagine
you are in the mountains, not Hemel Hempstead.

It's not just snowy weather that inspired me to write this post - there's also this amazing TEDx (teen) talk from ski fan Logan LaPlante who talks about how to hack life (ie, make cool changes). Worth having a look at too... here http://youtu.be/h11u3vtcpaY

I love the way snow messes up the UK - as kids we all long for it. As commuters we loathe it. As a mum I worry most about school ski trips. I've never skiied but I'd love to do so - it's just fiendishly expensive. However if you can collect the money together (and lots of schools give you as much as 18 months warning before a ski trip) the school ski trip is the way to let your kids have a taster. Mine are going to France and Italy in 2015 - both via coach.

Kitted up.

Turns out there are even better ways that guarantee snow and don't involve sacrificing the February half term or part of the two week Easter holidays... getting a taster session at a snowdome. The Snow Centre at Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire has two slopes - one looks huge, the other is a teaching slope. The centre offers lots of opportunities to learn how to ski and snowboard. You can hire equipment and buy it too. There's even the option of toboggan parties! And it's open all year - so you can learn to ski in the summer (when it's not going to be so crowded) or you can learn in the winter knowing there will be snow in the dome.

Kids can start snow lessons incredibly young - there are plenty of two year olds with snowboards at the Snow Dome. But my daughters joined a holiday class for 12-16year olds. It's nice to see them both trying something new together again as for a while that hasn't been possible. It's £55 for a two day course (two hours on two consecutive days) for 4-6 year olds and £99 for 7-16 year olds. There are good discounts for members though.

Lola

The verdict: learning to ski in the UK is still an expensive treat but the beaming smile on the kids' faces as they gradually learnt how to plough and slalom down the slope (so far without poles) was wonderful to watch. My motto is definitely becoming if you can give people the chance to learn to do a new skill, then do it! It was fun to watch their progress through the huge windows lining the Snow Centre's roomy cafe too - all in all a perfect ski taster which made me feel I could just have easily been in Andorra, Finland, France, Germany, Slovenia, Austria, Switzerland... or any of those fab skiing mountain resorts.

Nell

Travel tips: Take the train to Hemel Hempstead. A taxi from the station to the Snow Centre takes less than 10 minutes for the two mile journey and costs around £6 (it would take about 40 minutes to walk). And don't forget that if you are going skiing in Europe you can book a train via voyages-sncf.com thus avoiding the hassle of a plane or long car journey.

Making a journey an adventure - bikes

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post looks at ways to make a short cycle ride across the city into a mini-adventure. How do you turn a journey into something to enjoy rather than to endure? Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).

The start of our ride across London - about 10 miles round trip with an art show at the end. What's not to like about getting some exercise and a sightseeing tour of Bloomsbury, Soho, Trafalgar Square and Westminster? To make it fun we stopped half way for a snack.

Britain's biggest cities have good transport, so because I live in London I don't need a car. However my children are now teenagers and getting to the age when I possibly need to rethink decisions about how to get around. It's hard to learn to drive a car but a licence gives you all sorts of things - confidence, ability to rent a vehicle, possibly even jobs. I notice that lots of professional child-carers in the countryside have to pick kids up from school and then drive them somewhere else for tea or to meet their own families. Maybe when my oldest is 17 she'll be interested in learning to drive and I suspect that is far easier if you are able to pop into mum or dad's car for a practice...

Until then we have the bus and the tube. At 11 and 16 you need a different type of Oyster (zip) card. And at 16 you lose your cheap child fare but can use another discounted card (student rail card) until you are 25 or give up studying. After that the next discount is at 60. I've already noticed an increase in train travel bills, but for my family this was still far cheaper to use intercity trains and the occasional taxi than to either rent or buy a car we only really needed to use for three weeks in the summer.

Taking a long look at a crazy display in a pub window.

But I still want my kids to have a proper sense of direction. Sat Nav will help them if they end up getting behind a wheel, but before then I've been trying to show them how to read landscape and be bold about routes. Finding your own short cut is a strange pleasure however you are travelling. But you can only find shortcuts if you have a feel for where you are going, how the sun lines up or how your city is laid out.

I like to think of journeys as mini adventures, wherever I'm going. Sometimes it's nice to stretch your legs with a quick park detour on the way to the shops. Or you can make it more fun by using a bike and a map to add to your city-map knowledge as you exercise on the way to somewhere that's awkward to get to but an interesting destination, like an art gallery. Last weekend Nell, 13, and I cycled across London to a show at Tate Britain. We used a London cycle map to guide us through the back streets of Westminster, the only bit I was a bit vague about. The route was fantastic - although if you are nervous about traffic it's worth doing your exploring on early Sunday mornings when London is always quieter.

Here's an idea for a book about time travel, written by Pete May in this relevant space and dimension. It's called WHOVIAN DAD: Fandom, Fatherhood & Whovian Family Values.  Definitely funny.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Whovian-Dad-Doctor-Fandom-Fatherhood-ebook/dp/B00N4TN7ZY

Over to you
How do you encourage your kids to think of a journey as a chance to explore rather than endure?

Travel tips from travel writers

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. This post has a look at the way travel has changed - from adventure to grim necessity. Seems like a shame to all of us who still feel that travelling is a joy, and it is often better to travel than to arrive. Words from Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about my books and blogs).   


The photo above is of a gorgeous certificate my Great Aunt Aline was given for gamely taking a flight on 1 August 1949 across the Atlantic Ocean from London to Boston. It's an "overseas flight certificate" from the "captain of the flagship, Scotland" which states, "may all your journeys be pleasant ones". Ahh. Nowadays getting on a plane is so often the worst part of the journey - not just for you, but for the planet. So how did well-known travellers face up to the burden of getting there?


What the Dickens
I'd have loved to talk to Charles Dickens about his travel snaps. If he wasn't listening intently, ready to nick your lifestory then he was getting slightly over excited about how to get around, say taking the train to France (and remember he had no Channel Tunnel so had to use a boat too). Later, in 1865, he survived a train crash coming back from France close to Stapleton, Kent - it'd be interesting to find out what mental revisions he made to train travel then, although he comes close in this letter.

"There is a dreamy pleasure in this flying. I wonder where it was, and when it was, that we exploded, blew into space somehow a parliamentary train, with a crowd of heads and faces looking at us out of cages, and some hats waving... What do I care? 

Bang! We have let another station off, and fly away regardless. Everything is flying. The hop gardens turn gracefully towards me, presenting regular avenues of hops in rapid flight, then whirl away. So do the pools and rushes, haystacks, sheep, clover in full bloom delicious to the sight and smell, corn sheaves, cherry orchards, apple orchards, reapers, gleaners, hedges, gates, fields that taper off into little angular corners, cottages, gardens, now and then a church. Bang. Bang! A double-barrelled station! Now a wood, now a bridge, now a landscape, now a cutting, now a - Bang! a single-barrelled station - there was a cricket match somewhere with two white tents and then four flying cows, then turnips - now the wires of the electric telegraph are all alive, and spin, and blur their eges and go up and down, and make the intervals between each other most irregular, contracting and expanding in the strangest manner."
Charles Dickens on Travel (Hesperus Press, edited essays, 2009 from The Flight, 1851, p55)

Orwellian
What a contrast to George Orwell.

"So long as a machine is there, one is always obliged to use it. No one draws water from the well when he can turn on the tap. One sees a good illustration of this in the matter of travel. Everyone who has travelled by primitive methods in an undeveloped country knows that the difference between that kind of travel and modern travel in trains, cars, etc, is the difference between life and death. The nomad who walks or rides, with his luggage stowed on a came or an ox-cart, may suffer every kind of discomfort, but at least he is living while his is travelling; whereas for the passenger in an express train or a luxury liner his journey is an interregnum, a kind of temporary death. And yet so long as the railways exist, one has got to travel by train - or by cr or areoplane. When i want to go up to London why do I not pack my luggage on to a mule and set out on foot, making a two days of it? Becasue, with teh Green Line buses whizzing past me every ten minutes, such a journey would be intolerably irksome. In order that one may enjoy primitive methods of travel, it is necessary that no other method should be available."
The Road to Wigan Pier (Penguin, original edition 1937) p175

Backseat driving
See how jaded poor Bill Bryson, writing in the early 1990s, had got.

"If you mention in the pub that you intend to drive from, say, Surrey to Cornwall, a distance that most Americans would happily go to get a taco, your companions will puff their cheeks, look knowingly at each other, and blow out air as if to say, "Well now that's a bit of a tall order," and then they'll launch into a lively and protracted discussion of whether it's better to take the A30 to Stockbridge and then the A303 to Ilchester or the A361 to Glastonbury via Shepton Mallet. Within minutes the conversation will plunge off into a level of detail that leaves you, as a foreginer, swivelling your head in quiet wonderment."
Notes from Small Island (Black Swan, 1999 this edition specially for World Book Night p31)

Over to you
In contrast I tend to love where I go - else why leave? Let me know where you hope to go this year without using a plane.

A travel dilemma - can you help?

This blog is about family travel around the world without leaving the UK. Impossible? No. But what happens when your family say there's no option but to fly? This post is by Nicola Baird (see www.nicolabaird.com for more info about books and blogs).   Pic - yes it is of ducks (now with us for 3 weeks). They need to grow their wings. We humans need wings too.

My daughter is presenting me with a lot of big world problems. She's been invited on a school trip to Spain (flying there and back). And now a friend has invited her to stay in their apartment in Spain, at a different time (but it involves two flights as well). If I decide not to think about the financial cost - and instead focus on the opportunity, then she's an amazingly lucky girl, with a good selection of friends and a forward thinking school.

But if I think about the carbon costs, I'm in an utter dilemma because she must not go, at least not by plane. Flying has to be kept to the minimum, and ideally not done. See why in this learned report on low carbon travel from Sustrans.

I have allowed myself to be talked into the school trip - it's all to do with learning the language. But I feel wretched about it.

Her age luckily saves me this year from being evil mum and saying no to the friend's invite (or good citizen and saying no, depending on how you look at it) because the airline doesn't allow unaccompanied minors (ie, under 14s) to fly with it. There's something to praise EasyJet for!

Over to you
What would you do in a situation like this? It seems so simple - say no. Actually I have looked up the London-Madrid rail cost to see if I could take a merry jaunt across Europe to pick her up, but it's very expensive without having pre-booked by two months or more. However if you are organised, or one day wish to be, and can imagine travelling cheaply across Europe by train then start getting to know the maninseat61 because it's FAQs are better than anyones.

New start

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 10, and Nell, 7, like travelling around Britain on public transport (don’t laugh). We spent three happy months exploring during summer of 2007 but now we’re home, you can still join us for the occasional sightseeing - plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola

I’ve worked at Friends of the Earth for nine years (this is my desk after a serious clean up) and it seems like a blink. Working to magazine deadlines for Earthmatters (and all the others) is rather like being in the tropics – you just don’t feel time passing because of the lack of seasons.

When I lived in Solomon Islands (working as a magazine trainer at a development education NGO) I tried to notice time by noting when the mangoes were ripe or the flame trees blooming but it didn’t work. When I think back to Solo now, 16 years on, I just remember blue skies, blue sea, sweat, dust, magazine deadlines and friends.

Maybe I'll compress the whole Friends of the Earth experience similarly: stormy deadlines, sweat, paper, shut windows and friends.

But right now I'm remembering a really enjoyable goodbye pub drink plus some of the most perfect presents from my team, and ex-colleagues. These included a Baird poem; inventive vouchers from colleagues to cut my hair, photograph my pets and create a poster; and a Eurostar voucher for a great escape. An incredible, and lovely haul!

So here's a big thank you to Friends of the Earth - t h a n k y o u.

Hen on a bike

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 10, and Nell, 7, like travelling around Britain on public transport (don’t laugh). We spent three happy months exploring during summer of 2007 but now we’re home, you can still join us for the occasional sightseeing - plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola

This is the way my hens travel – on the back of the bike. This contraption carried nine of them yesterday for their summer break at Freightliners Farm.

We need transport too as we are invited to a wedding in a pear orchard in Kent and finding it hard to get to. As a result Pete has developed a new green radicalism. “There aren’t even instructions on how to get there by public transport,” he keeps moaning unable to find the nearest station (or a taxi rank) without ringing the long-suffering groom for instructions.

I explain that most people have cars, remembering my book The Estate We’re In: who’s driving car culture (Indigo, 1998). Pete says they don’t.

So we try counting the people we know with primary school aged children who don’t have cars. There are just five of us out of an acquaintanceship of more than 500 in this area (that’s thanks to school networks not enormous friendship powers). Normally Pete loves creating lists, but this time he seems a bit depressed.

For me it is a lesson to book the car club car in better time. Then we’d have the moral high ground and the wheels to make it to Kent with tent, food, spade and really wedding heavy gifts. For Pete it is an attempt to stop me getting more pets. “OK, we can do it by train this time,” he growls, “but if you got a dog then we’d have to have a car. And you don’t want that, do you?”

Waiting rooms

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 9, and Nell, 6, spent three happy months during summer of 2007 traveling around Britain. Now we’re home, but the travel bug is still there. Join us for the occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola

I hate waiting normally, but it's different at Cambridge station waiting for a train in the mock (c1945) panelled room by AMT's 100 per cent fair traded cafe. There's ethical ice tea for starters, but better still an atmosphere (thanks to a few framed photos) that almost transport you to Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard's famously Brief Encounter at Carnforth station. There's the endless announcements for journeys half-remembered, never taken, anticipated.

Lola, Nell and I have to spend an hour here waiting for Pete to drop something off. By the time he's ready to catch our train home we reckon the AMT franchise needs to cordon off a floor sitting space for kids to flop on; add some shelves of books and open the windows. I'd also like an area to dress in glamorous tweeds, so I can take a snap of myself with lipstick and a big engine backdrop which can be emailed/texted off to friends. Or maybe these waiting rooms could be filled with manuals - how to change a tyre, how to stop stockings running, tips for using up leftover fruit and bread, or atlases so you can mug up on pub quiz questions/holiday geography?

Our ideas were for simple stuff that doesn't involve eating... and enables the people who just can't relax to spend every waiting moment on a learning curve rather than an anxious gap between rush hours.

Crowded train

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 9, and Nell, 6, spent three months during the summer of 2007 traveling around Britain. Now we’re home but the travel bug is still there. Join us for occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint…

It’s a September Saturday and we’re off to our friends John and Ann’s wedding in Bristol. They’ve organized a BBQ and lazy afternoon at Bristol Zoo so we aim for the 10.05 out of Paddington Station. The Circle line seems suspiciously crowded but when we get to the main line station it is a sea of gold and green shirts worn by the crowds of one-time Sydney residents trying to get to Cardiff Millennium stadium for the World Cup rugby match between Wales and Australia. There are probably some Welsh fans in the melee, and less sporty travelers too but at Paddington’s glass-covered concourse it looks as if Australia has the most supporters.

The one charter train has already packed itself to capacity and left for Cardiff which means that we share our service with hundreds of fans desperate to get to the stadium on time. Our carriage is so crowded it would be wrong to sit in all our reserved seats, even if we could persuade people to shift, so we squeeze all four of us on to just two. Inevitably that means we have to earwig the surrounding conversations and that’s how we learn that Australians – when not talking about the rugby – are obsessed by European traveling, budget insurance (eg World Nomad), and have a check list of places to visit while in Britain which includes Brighton, Cornwall, the Regency circus at Bath, Stratford-upon-Avon and a pretty Cotswold village. Edinburgh Festival (in August) and the Munich beer fest (in October) are also obligatory.

Pete regularly travels on trains full of footie fans so he’s not phased by the over-crowding or surprised when our train is unable to pick up passengers at interim stations even ones as big as Reading and Swindon. Instead he enjoys the bonhomie, shared bottles of cider and sport talk.

In contrast I’m shocked that the train companies, like First Great Western, are so untogether that they don’t run longer or more trains to get fans to the ground. These big sporting dates aren’t a surprise so why do train operators let us all down by making zero effort to handle the demand? And why are trains allowed to be so over-crowded in an age when allegedly health and safety is a top priority?

As for the result: a 71,000 crowd see Australia beat Wales (20:32) in an allegedly good game. And because we were cheek by jowl with the Ozzies for most of the journey we can’t resist shouting a good on yerrrrr - even though we're now having a nice day at a white wedding.