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The long, cold, wet and boring winter days we have here in the UK are times which many of us quietly wish away, so apart from doing a bit of DIY and watching the Saturday afto the rugger match on TV there is little to do other than walking the dog or going down the pub - apart from planning your summer holidays of course. Sit round the fire with your family, or if the credit crunch has really bitten badly then make that "sit round a roaring candle" with a large scale map of Europe, assuming of course that you are going to take advantage of the cheaper hols on offer in France and Spain in either camping or staying in a mobile home. Planning a self drive twin centre holiday through France and into Switzerland is just the ticket for a cold weekend and it is something which can involve all the family.

Ok, so you may have a youngish family which usually means that you don't want to travel too far at one go - and it depends to a great extent where you live in the UK as to how far down France you get from Calais on your first day. We are in the middle of the Midlands and it is a good 5 hours to Dover or any of the Southern UK ports. If you sail four and a half hours from Poole to St Malo, and then drive down to the middle of the Vendee for 3 hours more then I think that is quite enough for one day in the saddle.

Alternatively you can make a superb twin centre holiday by having a week in the South of France and a week by the Swiss lake of Lausanne on your way back. You will have to do a little mountain driving to get there but that is all a part of the fun, and doing it this way instead of stopping for your week in Lausanne first assures that you don't have to travel too far back to Calais on your last day. Lausanne is not just a lake, far from it - it is a truly magnificent and vibrant city, well worth a look and a day out of your holiday just to walk round and absorb the atmosphere.

Self drive holidays like this will never die out because they allow you and your family so much freedom and the ability to move from place to place without difficulty. However, fly drive holidays are in vogue too because of the speed with which you arrive at your destination. You can fly cheaply to virtually any area of France these days and hire a car at the airport for a couple of weeks. All in all this should work out at roughly the same cost as a self drive holiday because there are no ferry fees, plus your fuel costs and Autoroute fees are cut well down.

Anyone contemplating twin centre holidays, especially if they are self drive, really needs to do a bit of planning or forward thinking. Even though the roads in France are extremely good there are times when you can be held up there or get lost as much as anywhere else, so allow slightly more time than you really need to get to your destination or the return ferry port. As well as that, and again it applies more to self drivers, it makes sense to go the furthest distance in the first week. That way you aren't as tired at the end of your holidays as you would be if you did it the opposite way round.