Everyone has a good holiday disaster story, don’t they? Even experienced travel journalists. Ours was a twist on the classic passport fiasco, that saw us having to “exchange” a two-week trip to the sunny Cinque Terre on the Italian Riviera for sitting on a compost toilet in Wales. Map for Llyn peninsula camping trip Like all good stories retold among friends, that is a bit of an exaggeration.
But after “passport-gate” – once the blame and threats of divorce had subsided – Bert’s Kitchen Garden, an eco campsite on a five-hectare (12-acre) farm in the Welsh village of Trefor on the Llŷn peninsula, became a half-term life-saver for our family of four. The panic started just 24 hours before we were supposed to depart, with our six-year-old daughter remarking that she still “looked like a baby” on her passport. Yup, it was out of date, and this set off several stages of rapid-fire grief, which we had to cycle through before I could land on “acceptance” and start hatching an emergency plan to rescue half-term.
View image in fullscreen Shepherd hut accommodation at Bert’s I’d had Bert’s on my longlist since reading about owners Ali and Ian Paice’s transformation of a former farm into an eco-retreat of connected meadows, woodlands and beach, with pitches mowed into wild meadows, shepherds’ huts and a feted kitchen garden restaurant. We paddled kayaks around the coast to sea stacks, hoping to get a glimpse of seals or even dolphins Driving into Tref.
