It was a cold night, sometime in the late nineties and after falling asleep in my room, I woke up outside in my Dad’s arms. He had tried to stealthily lift me from my bed and transfer me to the fully loaded car. However, his efforts failed and I woke up halfway down the driveway, feeling both disorientated yet safe. I rested my head against his familiar large chest and allowed my eyes to close and my body to drift back to sleep.

That was the beginning of a very long road trip to France. My little brother and I buckled up into our booster seats and my two older sisters squashed into the third row of seats - or the ‘very back’ as we liked to call it - between suitcases and pillows. My parents sat in the front, holding hands on the gearstick and probably hoping we all stayed asleep for most of the journey.

The journey was long. The hours spent in the car were only broken up by a two hour ferry ride over the Channel, during which I was very sick. The pink motion sickness tablets my mum gave me did absolutely nothing to calm my swirling stomach.

“I can’t feel anything,” my Dad would say proudly, every time he caught sight of my pale face. At six, I didn’t care that his years in the Merchant Navy had given him top class ‘sea legs’, I just didn’t want to feel ill anymore.

Time passed as the never ending motorways stretched on and on, my Dad navigating them with the ease of a local. We listened to France’s version of Radio 1 and the French pop music blurred into one upbeat yet completely incomprehensible mash of sound. My brother and I started to get extremely bored and restless. We were young and excited to go on holiday, yet neither of us had enquired as to where in France we were going.

This trip happened before I had a WalkMan to listen to my Britney Spears and Spice Girls cassettes on and it was well before a smartphone became an extra appendage to us all. With no phone to play games on, no social media to scroll or text messages to send to friends back home, we had no choice but to play family car games. After multiple rounds of ‘I Spy’ and searching for yellow cars, my sisters suggested a new game.

“Let’s play, who can keep their eyes closed the longest!” suggested one of the girls from the back of the car, the excitement in her voice making it sound like the best game in the world.

My brother and I were forever in competition with each other so, naturally, we both scrunched up our eyes and refused to open them until the weakest sibling caved. Time passed with spots of black swirling under my eyelids, it could have been minutes or hours or just thirty seconds. I was in the zone, determined to win.

“Ok, you both win. Open your eyes!” my sisters declared from the seats behind us.

My brother and I opened our eyes to be greeted by the most euphoric view for any young child, the stretching gates of Disneyland Paris. I wish I had a photograph of our faces the moment we realised where we were. To our six and four year old little brains, this was almost too much excitement to control - we were going to Disneyland!

The rest of that car journey has vanished from my memory, but I remember that holiday to Disneyland vividly and will forever be impressed that my sisters managed not to ruin the surprise. It was the first of many family holidays, several of which involved a rocky ferry crossing and hours spent in the back of a car, listening to songs no one could understand on the radio.

In my eyes, all of the best memories begin with you piled into a car, surrounded by luggage and the people you love the most.