Booking is the first decision. Parks along the English coast, ours included, typically open the following summer's diary not long after the current season ends, and the best pitches and the specific weeks that overlap with the tail end of one school's term and the start of another's holiday tend to go first. Booking in autumn or winter for the following August gives a genuine choice of week and accommodation; booking in June for the same August usually means taking whatever's left.

For a family with children, particularly school-age ones, a week tends to work harder for the effort involved. Packing for several people, planning meals, keeping children entertained: all of that overhead is roughly the same whether the stay is three nights or seven, so a longer stay spreads that effort across more days and generally works out better value per night too. A week also allows for the inevitable one wet day without losing the whole trip, and gives time to properly see more than a single nearby town.

Spring itself is a good season for a coastal or countryside break, arguably underused compared with summer. Days are properly lengthening by May, hedgerows are at their best, and the coast still has some of the calm of the off-season without the risk of a genuinely wintry day. A walk along the front near a park like ours on the East Yorkshire or Norfolk coast in May usually means decent light until early evening, without the peak-season crowd that arrives from June onwards.

The obvious appeal is space. A beach that holds hundreds of towels in August is often down to a handful of dog walkers and the odd bird watcher outside the school holidays. Coastal paths near parks like ours on the North Yorkshire and East Yorkshire coast are at their best when they're not crowded, and the light in autumn and early spring tends to sit lower and softer over the water than the flat glare of a July afternoon.

There's a practical side too. If your children are tied to term dates, travelling even a day either side of the official holiday means less competition for the roads and the local attractions, without losing any of the actual holiday. Leaving on the Saturday after school seaside caravan breaks up, rather than fighting the Friday afternoon exodus, can shave a good hour or two off a journey to the coast.

The trade-off is simple enough: travel in the school holidays and you get everything open and everyone with you, at the cost of booking sooner and paying peak-week prices. Travel just outside them, where you can, and you get a quieter park and a shorter drive, if your children's school allows it. Either way, the sooner the dates are pinned down, the more of the choice stays in your hands rather than whoever booked before you did.