Center Parcs Belgium - a brief report on De Vossemeren

[Lostbrain]

I have very fond memories of Center Parcs from childhood. I went to Sherwood Forest a few times when I was a child, possibly soon after it opened? I have wanted to take my family for a while, but as a teacher, restricted to school holidays, I just couldn't bare to part with that much money! I'd heard that you could get good deals on the European sites and so having seen some positive reviews on Mumsnet I looked into De Vossemeren - which is in Belgium, very near the Dutch border.

We booked for this Feb half term several months ago. I played about with the website and found that booking through different country sites brought up different prices (UK site obviously being the most expensive). So we finally booked a 4 night break through the Dutch site, we got an early booking discount, a family discount (you get a reduction if you are travelling with under 12s or over 65s) we could pick our cottage (except I couldn't easily work out how and wasn't really bothered) and we got three activity vouchers (which again weren't used). The downside was that all my receipts were in Dutch, but that wasn't a big issue.

Travel day
We travelled by Le Shuttle on Monday - taking the car. Eurostar do a Mon-Fri return that is quite reasonable and meant that the train was about the same cost as the ferry, but 35mins which made the long journey slightly more bearable. We live in North Hampshire, not far from Basingstoke, so we set off about 8am to get to Folkstone for an 11am sailing. Travelling east meant we lost an hour to time zone change and got to Calais at about 1pm. We headed to Cite Europe and Flunch - no pics I'm afraid - and had a half decent lunch. Afterwards we went to Carrefour to stock up on wine, beer, squash, biscuits.. all the essentials. Then it was onwards to Belgium. Google maps has this as a 3 hour journey - we were stuck for about 40minutes in Antwerp traffic jams, poorly planning the journey meant we got to Antwerp just as the afternoon rush hour hit it's peak. We finally arrived at De Vossemeren at 8pm. We were tired, the on site market closed at 8, we were all too tired to go out for dinner. Tea consisted of the munchies we'd picked up at Calais.

The chalet was nice, but pretty basic, we'd booked the mid-priced 'premium' option. I suspect that other than having a coffee pod machine and made-up beds this is no different from the basic 'comfort' chalet.

If doing the journey again I'd go for an earlier train, spend less time in Calais and actually buy dinner for the first night at Carrfour! We had considered booking a night in France and travelling on the Sunday, but this seemed expensive.

A trip to Amsterdam and bike hire was planned for the next day.