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Wales beach holiday: better than Cornwall? Fed up with taking the same beach holiday in Cornwall year after year, Clover Stroud struck out for the Welsh coast.....

I've driven down the A303 towards Cornwall too many times (Look! Stonehenge!) to be able to face it again this summer. I wanted to do something that neither I, nor my children, aged nine and seven, had done before. Because although I like to think I'm doing things my own way, I'm often struck by a deflating sense of déjà vu when it comes to my holidays.

You know the feeling: just when you think you're doing something interesting and original, you find yourself on the same beach, eating the same sort of sandwiches (crab, usually), having the same row with the same people about who has kicked sand into the picnic, while quite possibly sitting on the same, slightly threadbare towel you sat on as a child.

The problem was that I'd promised my children a beach holiday. They'd requested a trip made up of ice creams, barbecues, camping and beaches with sand, not pebbles. That ruled out Norfolk, both because of the pebbly beaches at Cley and Salthouse and because it was a place I'd visited more often than Cornwall.

"Also we think it'd be fun if we did a road trip, as long as you don't make us listen to screechy country and western music all the way," my son said.

Ignoring the Siren calls of St Ives, Penzance and Mevagissey, I pointed my compass west. Then, courtesy of VW and the van of my dreams, a metallic blue VW California, we drove to Borth, in west Wales, with a view to making our way down the coast to St David's. In some small but defiant way, we were striking out on a voyage of discovery. A few hours outside Oxford, we were standing outside the van, speechless, for once with pleasure, to be in real mountains, without having had to drive all that way to Scotland or get on a plane, to find them. The Brecon Beacons were dotted with vivid splashes of gorse, bright in the sunshine, and myopic cows, a handful of which gazed at us impassively from behind a metal gate.
A quick row under our belt about whether we should stop for ice creams at Pantmawr, we drove farther west until we could sense the coast was near and that summer holidays were moments away.

Within seconds of our arrival, a brisk wind whipped the dancing white horses into crashing waves and a gale blew in. Bad weather and summer holidays do together like Gatwick airport and queues, so this was as it should be. Borth is a narrow strip of houses and not overly twee, but the children couldn't have cared less and ran along the beach throwing stones, anoraks flapping against their thin legs.

But I didn't know how to create the next bit of holiday. Where would we camp? What would we eat? Suddenly, I felt a powerful longing for the familiarity of Trebetherick and Cornwall.Trebetherick! The name alone gave me a melancholic ache of desire and guilt, like the memory of a devoted lover I'd jilted for the unknown, untested allure of west Wales. But, resolute, I turned my attention back to blameless Borth and resolved to concentrate on the good stuff.

The children pounded back to the VW to find a skim board and spent the rest of the afternoon doing their utmost to break an ankle, while I talked to the lifeguard, who seemed pleased that he now had an actual job to do. The sun came out, too, so we bought dressed crabs from the butcher on the high street, and flapjacks from a café nearby. Suddenly we were laughing, slap bang in the middle of a summer holiday that was all of our own making. We had the VW to sleep in, too, so the fact the campsite was located on a peat bog didn't matter: we slept in the pop-up roof, which Jimmy Joe said was better than living inside a James Bond film.
Because we had no tent to pack, nor tent pegs to hunt for, leaving the one-night stand of Borth was fast and painless and we were soon on the road to Aberystwyth, listening to country music (George Jones) and arguing about where to stop for lunch.

I won this argument as my son, Jimmy Joe, couldn't pronounce any of the names on the map, and my daughter, Dolly, couldn't read them, and with that feeling of "must get as many miles under my belt as possible before eating again and no, we're not stopping even for the loo" that any really relaxed road trip engenders. By lunch we'd barrelled down the coast as far as New Quay for, well, crab sandwiches, obviously. New Quay is a former smugglers' port, with Victorian terraces slithering down a steep hillside to a cobbled harbour and craggy coastline, with the promise of bottle-nosed dolphins in the distance. Because it was easier to allow Dolly to believe she had seen a dolphin waving its fin at her than tell her it was a lone swimmer, I left New Quay secure in the knowledge that whatever the rest of the week held, she would remember New Quay as a place where dreams came true.

At Llangrannog things became tricky. Driving a California is delightful, because in most places, people stared longingly at us. Admittedly, most of these places were windy campsites and the people staring were fighting with nylon and gale-force winds. But driving down the narrow road to Llangrannog, with no passing places, was one of the few moments I felt about as popular as white van man. The only way to deal with this was to turn up the screechy country music and drive on, oblivious, because the beach, like the gold at the end of the rainbow, was worth it. Wedged into a slice of bracken-covered cliffs, the sand gave way to dramatic rocks. Jimmy Joe vanished to look at sea anemones in rock pools, but Dolly held my hand as we went to the Patio Cafe for ice creams. Here, teenagers freed from the bondage of exams were working their tans and bursting with hormones. We ordered pistachio and strawberry with extra sugar sprinkles and the boy behind the tubs told Dolly the biggest rock on the beach, called Carreg Bica, was spat out by a giant to cure his tooth ache. Giants and dolphins meant I'd hit the jackpot as a mother today, and another beachside campsite, with fish and chips in Cardigan for supper, meant we all slept soundly.

After two days of beach life and three days on the road, I was craving a fat-free diet and some culture. We found the latter at Castell Henllys, a magical Iron Age fort with reproduction roundhouses among the wild flowers. Then it was on to Fishguard, where I felt like a television historian as I marched the reluctant children around the Last Invasion Gallery, with a history of the chaotic Franco-Irish revolutionary invasion of Britain by a bunch of mostly drunken convicts in 1797. The children, fingers itching for plastic pleasures of the Pound Paradise around the corner, were unimpressed by the wonderful Bayeaux-style tapestry commemorating the event, made on the bicentenary in 1997, until they found an image of a thief having his throat cut: then the afternoon looked up no end.

Waking the next morning to a streaky orange dawn and a certainty that none of us were going to go back to sleep, even though it was 5am, we wiggled on around the coast road, leaving the southern sweep of Cardigan Bay behind us, and dropped off the main road to Porthgain for the only breakfast available (a tube of Pringles and a shared Twix). We crabbed, unsuccessfully, off the harbour in the shadow of the old brickworks and ruined workers' cottages, then walked onto the cliff tops as the sun came out and St David's beckoned.

The smallest city in the country, St David's was a place I'd always wanted to visit, but had always been too busy flirting with Cornwall and Norfolk to get close to.
Three decades of expectation was a lot to live up to, but walking down the Thirty Nine Articles, the steps named after Thomas Cranmer's Anglican beliefs, I felt a lift as the honeyed tower of the cathedral rose before us, and the soft tread of pilgrims who've made this same trip across the centuries echoed around us. Gulls screamed overhead and the air off the sea was whip-sharp as the children tumbled around the crumbling walls of the quadrangle in the Bishops Palace.

Nothing about St David's disappoints. It's a place I want to visit many times over the next few years. I could tell you, too, about the afternoons we spent on the beaches of the Pembrokeshire coast in the three days after that. About barbecues and cricket on Whitesands beach, and camping at Newgale, and trips to Pebbles Cafe to buy beach paraphernalia; about the roll-call of wonderful beaches – Manorbier, Freshwater East, Barafundle Bay, Broad Haven South – that line this uncluttered and wild, wild stretch of coast. I could tell you about them, but maybe you know about them already. And if you don't, and are sitting in a traffic jam on the A303 as you read this, well, I don't want to ruin your holiday, but my heart now belongs to Pembrokeshire.

Getting there You can hire a VW California from Campervantastic (020 8291 6800; www.campervantastic.com), which during high summer costs from £795-£830 for seven days’ hire.
The best campsite near Borth is Gwerniago Farm on the road to Machynlleth (01654 791227; www.gwerniago.co.uk), an idyllic rural site from £2 per night for children and £10 per night for couples.
There’s good camping near St David’s at Whitesands Beach campsite (01437 721472), with prices from £6 per night; Pencarnan Farm (01437 720324; www.pembrokeshire-camping.co.uk), with prices from £10 per night; and Newgale (01437 710253; www.newgalecampingsite.co.uk), with prices from £5 per person per night. For camping near Llangrannog, try Manorafon Holiday Park (01239 623633; www.manorafonholidaypark.co.uk).
For some of the best crab sandwiches on this stretch of coast, go to Cwtch at 22 High Street, St David’s.

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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/uk/7943150/Wales-beach-holiday-better-than-Cornwall.html