A HOME AWAY FROM HOME - TRAVELODGE STOCKPORT

As a family we generally try to keep our trips away from home, overnight, minimal. That is unless we're heading off on holiday of course, because in truth it can be really hard when you have small children. When you're used to spreading out across a house and all having your individual space, the thought of being holed up in one small hotel room hasn't hugely appealed to me. But with a flight departing from Manchester I didn't really want to risk driving up the same day as I just knew traffic wouldn't be on our side. We opted for a Travelodge, mainly because I roughly knew what to expect, we'd stayed in them before and my main priority was a good night sleep which I was pretty confident we could get there.

MARK WARNER PHOKAIA BEACH RESORT

Where oh where do I begin with our Mark Warner break? There is so much to talk about that I'm going to be dividing the posts up over the next few weeks, with this being a general round up of our thoughts on the entire trip. If you're here looking for the in-depth reviews of the childcare, facilities, hotel or food then stick around and hold tight as I want to give them the detail they deserve. So, cast your minds back to March when we were selected to be Mark Warner ambassadors, it was a huge deal for me as we're so passionate about travel and showing our boys as much of the world as we can - we were delighted. Even more so when we realised we'd be headed to the brand new resort in Foca, Turkey, only opening a mere month before we made our trip, I knew it was going to be something special. And that it was.

JOIE PACT PUSHCHAIR - A TRAVEL MUST HAVE

When I found out that we had been selected as Mark Warner Ambassadors this year, I knew that travel was on the cards, but more importantly, travel with a toddler. Patrick has just turned two and whilst he is fiercely independent, there wasn't a cat in hells chance I would be visiting another continent without a suitable pushchair for him to travel in. As much as I'm sure he'd protest that he doesn't need to sit in one. I researched long and hard on which pushchair would be best, we have a fair number of previous flights under our belt so I had pretty specific expectations in mind for what I wanted, after all if we were in Turkey and suddenly realised that the stroller wasn't working for us, there wouldn't be much we could do about it. You could say my standards were set a little too high, so I was wary nothing would match up.