Camping L'Escale

Drive for 10 minutes to reach the coast around Wimereux for one of the top beaches in the area and try your hand at windsurfing, paddleboarding and kitesurfing while you’re here. For a wander in wilder nature, dawdle over to La Pointe Aux Oies and the Dunes de la Slack or forget about strolls and have a go on the green at the town’s coastal golf course. For indoor amusement, Cité Europe (15 minutes) is a mall-type complex housing shops selling everything from fashion and beauty to sport and leisure, along with an enormous cinema, a bowling alley and fast food outlets. If the kids still need distracting after a morning here, a trip to Hélicéa’s pool and ice-skating rink (10 minutes) should do the trick. Sticking to the indoors, spot sea creatures up close – including tropical fish, seals, sharks and penguins – at the biggest aquarium in Europe, the Nausicaa Centre National De La Mer (10 minutes) aquarium. Out in the open air again, Boulogne (15 minutes) has an old town that’s top for traipsing about; the ‘Upper City’, as it was once known, is full of historical buildings. For another glimpse of the past, the Second World War Museum (20 minutes) displays artefacts tracing the events of the period between 1939 and 1945 in an 800-metre-square space.