The theory is; the bigger the budget, the smoother the holiday. According to this simple formula, we should use all the money we have each summer to propel ourselves somewhere exciting with as much comfort and speed as possible.
But this logic is turned utterly on its head when you have to factor in the presence of a small baby. From now on the key holiday issue will no longer be how appealing the destination is, but how the hell to handle the travel. Whether your pin in the map comes down on the Mediterranean or on Dorset, suddenly the only really important element is moving all that baby impedimenta.
A travel cot, a pushchair, a baby bath, a highchair, a car seat, a changing bag and a backpack baby-carrier surely all qualify in airport-trolley-terms as awkward excess baggage. Sterilising equipment and supplies of regular baby food don't help either. And neither does the baby itself: a piece of crucial luggage that really ought to sleep and eat at certain predetermined intervals. Driving to the chosen holiday, however far away it is, quickly emerges as the least complicated answer.
All of which is a slightly embarrassed way of explaining how, for the first time in my life, I found myself staying in a succession of mobile homes on French campsites. It may not sound like a solution sent from heaven - but it is the closest thing to convenience and comfort a new parent on the move is ever likely to know.
I broke up my trip to the South of France over three nights, staying in sites that were spaced out at roughly even intervals along the Autoroute du Soleil. As someone who has often argued, sometimes actually protested, that camping and, by extension, campsites, are pleasures best enjoyed by those between the ages of four and 11, I do now have to eat some of my words. I wouldn't say I was actually an enthusiast, but I no longer shrink from the idea of a night under corrugated fibreglass.
For me, the chief benefit is the simple fact that you can back the brimming boot of your car right up to the door of the place where you will be sleeping. As a result, a heavy bag of baby equipment does not have to be lugged from a car into a hotel lobby and then up stairs. What is more, if you need to jemmy your way into a fresh bumper pack of nappies in the middle of the night, you can just put on a T-shirt and haul it from under the passenger seat in a couple of minutes, rather than having to get properly dressed and make faltering conversation with a hotel night porter about why you need urgent access to the car park.
Staying in a mobile home - and do hear me out - also means that when you arrive in the evening, tired from the long drive south, the domestic surroundings are reassuringly familiar - although hopefully the temperature outside is several degrees warmer. Indeed, if you were to stick to exactly the same model of mobile home over the length of your journey, you would find that even the corkscrew and the tin opener were lying ready to greet you from the same place in the same drawer on each stop.
Not all the advantages of travelling this way are quite so appallingly practical, to be fair to mobile homes. When you stay at campsites en route, the facilities laid on will help you quickly forget all the driving you have just done. Provided you arrive early enough in the evening, the swimming pool, the boating lake, the tennis courts and the ever-changing French countryside all around you each await investigation.
One of the quirks of a British holiday company like Eurocamp is that we were met alternately on arrival by Yorkshire lads or skinny youths from Maidstone. This may not seem like the right way of getting into the spirit of a French holiday, but it is pretty welcome when you are exhausted and you have to shout over a crying baby.
Most of the couriers seem to be young people who have thrown their life into orbit for a summer to spend it cycling about a campsite looking after British guests. Some of these sites even look a little bit like Britain, with their privet hedges and street lamps.
At worst, the rows of mobile homes in the bigger sites operate as a kind of mini-suburbia, but without the comforts and privacy afforded to residents of the average cul de sac back home. Open your curtains in the morning and you will be confronted with middle-aged Brits traipsing off from their tent in their pyjamas, towel and wash bag in hand, to find the communal shower blocks.
It can be quite hard, too, to leave a good impression on your temporary neighbours when they are living so very close by. I watched the windows on the next-door camper van pull tightly shut one evening when my jaunty call for some help with opening a jar of regional cassoulet was met with an expletive-laced response from my partner who was busy changing a nappy. Hard to say whether the camper-vanners objected to the pretentious menu or the swearing.
And, while we are down among the nitty gritty, if you are planning mobile-home stopovers you will have to bring along your own loo rolls, washing-up liquid, towels and bed linen. Travel cots and highchairs can be provided by Eurocamp.
The great advantage for anyone driving down to the Med is, of course, the incredible variety of scenery, even if you have to stick to the autoroutes. At their wild and untamed best, the campsites echo the features of the landscapes around them. They can bring you much closer to them than a hotel ever could.
The height of my experience was the extraordinary stay on the return journey at Bourg d'Oisans in the Alps, where the swimming pool is flanked by white-tipped peaks. (Although at this camp it was also phenomenally cold at night - we should have left the heater on.)
The other great joy of driving through France is the service stations. They all appear to have wonderful baby-changing rooms and fantastic restaurants, with clean highchairs and public microwaves for the parent in transit who needs to warm up baby food. Even the basic roadside truck stops are landscaped with picnic tables and have drinking fountains and functioning loos. You really don't need to go near a bistro on a market square to know you are in France.
Two words of warning: first, leave more time than you think for each section of your journey; and don't let the green-eyed monster get you during your stay in a 'mobilome', as the French call them. It is all too easy, once initiated into this strange, dolls' house world, to start lusting after the little extras laid on in the top-of-the-range home next door.
Factfile
Vanessa Thorpe travelled with P&O (08705 20 20 20; www.posl.com) from Dover to Calais. A car hired from National Car Rental (0870 400 4579; www.nationalcar.co.uk) costs £885 for 19 days .
Eurocamp (0870 366 7552; www.eurocamp.co.uk) has tents and mobile homes in more than 160 holiday parks across Europe, with the majority in France. Children's clubs are available at around 30 of its European campsites, for ages four to teenage.
