Author Barbara Fox reveals Australia is her favourite holiday hotspot

My Favourite Holiday: Barbara Fox.

“We did exactly the same thing for holidays every year when I was young.

“With my dad being a parish priest, we’d go to a retreat house in Riding Mill near Hexham in Northumberland which was for clergy families. In fact, it’s still a retreat house for the Diocese of Newcastle and Durham.

“It was the closest thing to staying in a hotel, which we couldn’t have afforded. There were about four or five meals a day and we had the run of this nice big house.

“We used to run wild in the huge garden. We’d make our own entertainment, while I guess my mum and dad would socialise with the other clergy.

“With no computer games, it’d be rounders or hide-and-seek or putting on some kinds of entertainment in the old summer house in the grounds. It was all very Enid Blyton!

“Then we hired a simple cottage at Embleton looking out over the sand dunes to Dunstanburgh Castle. My parents loved it because it was totally cut off from parish life with no phones or ringing of the vicarage doorbell to bother them.

“I still go back with my family. My husband and boys play golf and I walk from Embleton to lovely Craster via the castle.

“With my mum having her wonderful nursing experiences in America I always dreamed of having a holiday there. We couldn’t afford it until I was about 18 and Freddie Laker opened it up by having all those cheap flights.

“We went out and stayed with friends my mum had met in San Francisco. Using their place as a base we did our own mini road trip around California, Arizona and Nevada.

“What I’d really like to do is recreate more of their amazing road trip from the 1950s. My mum’s just turned 80 and the other three friends who went everywhere in the States are all still hale and hearty.

“Through the internet we’ve become reacquainted with some of the people they’d lost touch with it and it’d be fantastic to go there with them.

“The other place I really love is Australia. An old school friend emigrated to Sydney when she was 15 and I’ve been to stay with her a couple of times.

“As well as seeing Sydney I travelled up to Queensland near Cairns and had a four-day camping trip in the Northern Territory.

“That was a real highlight as we went from Alice Springs to Ayers Rock and also to lesser-known parts like King’s Canyon which was pretty spectacular.

Author Barbara Fox’s first book Bedpans & Bobby Socks told the true story of a remarkable road trip her mum took across America in the 1950s.

Nurse Gwenda, whose husband was a Northumberland parish priest, set off with a group of friends and drove right across the States, picking up work along the way.

Now 52-year-old Barbara has written a book about what life was like growing up in the north east of England in the 1970s.

It’s called Is the Vicar In, Pet? because of the oft-said query from the non-stop queue of parishioners at the front door.