ASD holiday recommendations please!

[suburbandream]

After a disastrous holiday abroad last year where everything was just too noisy/different/foreign/out of routine for DS2, I'd love to hear some positive holiday recommendations please! Where have you been that has been great for your ASD DCs?

1. Self-catering and I take all his normal foods from home so that it is all the right boxes and names etc and them he can eat on his normal schedule 5am, 12pm & 5pm - which not many hotels can manage!
2. Cabin/chalet/caravan/apartment - anywhere with plenty of space inside & out. We can manage a hotel room for an overnight or two stay, nothing more.
3. Kid's club or activity group or ski school etc. Anything we can build a schedule on to, preferably with morning & afternoon sessions.

The siblu, keycamp, eurocamp type places work extremely well for us.

We had a disastrous hotel holiday in Turkey two years ago, it was just too much for DS - he was almost 3 and it was before we had his ASD dx. An overnight in a hotel is manageable but not really a holiday option! Last year we had a caravan holiday in Cornwall - much better as we had our own food / bedding / dvds etc.
This year we are going to a villa in a quiet part of Spain that has it's own pool. DS will have his own room with TV to watch his dvd s and he loves swimming!!! He loves trips in the car so we should be ok for getting about.
We have dd 7 to think of too so we think this is the best option for us, we can please ourselves and not have to worry about other people!!!

We love camping, we take all our own things and keep to routine when Dd3 needs us to. We didnt start going till she had stopped running off though and the first camp I was nervous sbout losing her so she wore an id bracelet. Now she is older 9 she rides her bike around the site and goes to the playground when its quiet.

I second camping. Once you have done it once everything looks the same inside the tent no matter where you are. Provided it is a secure field.

I like to camp near the playground if there is one and children seek ds out despite his problems because often a)he's the only one there at that particular time and b)children become children again in fields and there is just less pressure on ds when they DO play with him. It is all sticks and holes, not conversations about superheros and wiis iyswim, which he isn't capable of keeping up with.

Last summer we did LOADS of camping and despite the awful rain it still worked and I remember it fondly.

Oh, and if you take a box of lego and a mat and put it outside your tent you'll get an endless supply of playmates.

we do camping in the summer & centre parcs in the winter. For us sleep & food are the big issues so we need to be somewhere self catering & self contained. We take ds' various screens so he gets some down time in the evenings but ideal for him is loads of time in the water &/or outdoors.

We also pretty much always go with other families (many of our friends have children with ASD so are all extremely relaxed & tolerant), so ds has children to play with if he feels like it & my other children can go off with their friends if ds has a bad day.

We've just got back from CP (£199 for 6 of us for a midweek break) & it was great - this week ds has mastered queuing for the water slide (ie not getting angry when other kids push in & mess around), can doggy paddle across the pool & was actually worried (but not scared) of getting lost so was attending to me & responding first time when I called to him. Also actually played with some other kids :) If you had a very hypersensitive child I think CP might be difficult - busy, noisy, lots of queues - the pools anyway.

Center Parcs for us as well, especially if he would like the pool. Camping was a no no as he'd just escape and run off when he was smaller, and now he likes his electronics too much!

Queuing for the water slides was the first time he'd happily queued for anything, although he pushed in outrageously at the children's slides. I pretended he wasn't mine.

We moved on to eurocamp type holidays, in our car, self catering etc, taking familiar food, bedding etc, but in a mobile home rather than a tent.

He'll do hotels with buffet food, now, since he was about 9 or 10. Good luck!

First reaction would be to say - don't bother as DS hates the change of routine.

Two really good holidays we've has spring to mind:

1. caravan where we took an additional TV and let him set up his computer games so he spent most of the evenings in his own bedroom doing just what he does at home

2. taking him on a cruise was very successful. Small ship he could find his way around, could retreat to his cabin when stressed, could even has his meals in it and once you'd boarded for him the environment stayed the same - it was just the ship that moved.

Packages in foreign hotels have been bad experiences.

We do Centre parcs in the winter and Camping in the summer too. We had planned to sell our camper at the end of last summer but cant bring myself to do it yet

I am very tempted by this place though autism holiday

Forest Holidays are fantastic! Log cabin in middle of woods, with hot tub, with Wii, all cutlery and utensils. Beautiful quiet surroundings, bike hire available and forest activities with rangers

Thanks everyone! I think self catering in the UK is the way to go, although sometimes I think that's not much of a holiday for me - washing up with a different view! I suppose our ideas of what a holiday constitutes have to change a bit once we have kids, especially if they find the idea of change difficult. We've done centre parcs a few times and I loved it but DH has gone off the idea a bit. The main problem we have is that DS2 loves the water but absolutely hates being splashed so our last foreign holiday which was all centred around the pool was a nightmare. Maybe a villa with our own pool would work if we venture abroad. I like the idea of the woodland lodges, Chundle, will look into that. We are getting a puppy too so if we found dog friendly places that would be ideal, both DSs love nature.

Camping is still a possibility for electronics addicts, we had electric hook up last year for the first time and good old Tracy Beaker came with us.

Personally I prefer it without but the Dd's really enjoyed watching a movie snuggled up in their sleeping bags in the evening.

We have done a few cabin type holidays in the winter and these are lovely, they often have a pool and early in the year we have often been the only people in it.

I agree about it not being a holiday for us Mums but I just love to be away and am really lucky that Dd3 does too so long as we have our own things around us and stick to her routine.

We have been to some fab places in cornwall and wales and each year we are getting more adventurous as she gets older.
We are also lucky that she like rules and so I can set her boundaries and know she won't venture far from them.