Middle age isn't all bad. Here is just one of the unsung bonuses: if you passed your driving test before 1997, you're already qualified to raise merry hell on public roads at the wheel of a car-plus-caravan "outfit" of up to 8.25 tonnes in weight. So when you see someone under 30 towing a caravan, be content that at least they know what they're doing, having proven so in a stringent supplementary test. Except you won't, because unless they're stealing it or are en route to some Top Gear-sponsored demolition derby, no one under 30 tows a caravan.

Two things threaten that demographic. First, recession: a domestic caravan holiday is cheap, which explains why bookings at Caravan Club sites are up by 40 per cent this year. Second, Airstream - the only caravan it's OK to want, or indeed ever to refer to by name - has just released a modish European range. These factors are fated never to work in tandem, however, because Airstreams are tremendously expensive.

In the deeply conservative world of caravan design, standing out from the crowd is a simple matter of not looking like a big margarine tub. With their curvaceous silver flanks and their smoked glass, the new Airstreams manage this with some ease. The European range pays strident homage to the US firm's iconic 1936 launch model, a gleaming, bullet-nosed embodiment of that era's obsession with aerodynamics and shiny metal, fittingly crafted by the designer responsible for Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St Louis monoplane. It's a testament to their timeless appeal, and aluminium's rust-resistant durability, that an astonishing 70 per cent of all Airstreams ever made are still on the road.

Mindful that I live in a road of modest breadth and challenging geometry, I elected to pick up my Airstream International 684 - and the mighty Land Rover thoughtfully provided by the firm to save my turn-of-the-century Mondeo estate any embarrassment - from the car park of our local B&Q. The prudence of this arrangement asserted itself at once. The principal distinction of Airstream's European models, I'd been told, was that they'd been condensed in sympathy with our cramped and twisty-turny continent. Compact was not a word that sprang to mind as I surveyed my family's home and haulier for the weekend ahead: a shining, eight-wheeled convoy that filled the tarmac chasm between garden deliveries and the trolley rack. It would have looked more at home trundling across Red Square on May Day.

Two shimmering tonnes and 50 grand's worth of hand-riveted aluminium and high-end consumer electronics: on the caravan spectrum, this was well away from Father Ted's holiday home, and closer to the sort of thing that Russell Crowe might be found losing his temper inside. If Jeremy Clarkson's tireless caravan-baiting suggests a man protesting too much, his guilty secret would be an Airstream at the back of the quadruple garage.

My daughters were won over before they even got in, by the step that electrically projected itself to welcome them up to the door. My son was never going to be a tough nut to crack, institutionalised as he is to bijou living after 15 years in a box room, sleeping on a stilted bed with his nose a foot from the ceiling. The permanent queen-sized mattress installed at the Airstream's very distant back seemed to placate my wife who, like me but with greater foreboding, had expected to assemble something from many lengths of sofa cushion.

For me, one glance around the interior - flat-screen telly, downlighters, climate control - emphasised how wonderfully little this weekend would share with my solitary relevant experience, a family tour of North Wales during an earlier recession-related caravanning boom in the mid-70s. That caravan, borrowed from my grandfather, was built from hardboard and Formica, and offered only two berths. So it was that every night my older siblings and I huddled together at the mildewed flaps of an earwig-colonised army-surplus tent pitched alongside, watching my parents knock back the Mateus Rosé. Justice was served when our chemical toilet overturned during an ascent of Britain's second-steepest road, shedding its grim load across their sleeping quarters.

The last time I looked, which in fairness wasn't recently, caravans were still exclusively furnished in horrible brown gingham and made out of old kitchen units. The Airstream really is not. Pimped up beyond all recognition, it hardly deserves to be called a caravan. Bold colours and elliptical storage holes impart the retro-futuristic vibe of a space-station shuttle in 2001. The bathroom sink is one of those swanky counter-top porcelain troughs, and the white-piped leather and louche cushions give the U-shaped seating zone the look of a holding area for high-class groupies. If you're not a glutton for attention, look elsewhere for your mobile accommodation. We weren't so much going on holiday as going on tour.

The 684 is Airstream's hugest model, something I came to appreciate as the cheery man who'd delivered it walked me around the preposterous perimeter. Street-legal I might have been, but it wasn't hard to understand why Airstream had politely insisted on bolstering age with a little experience. The week before, at their behest, I had travelled to the Caravan Club's training centre in Sussex for a half-day caravan-manipulating masterclass. Under the calm eye of instructor Bernie Jones, I very nearly succeeded in backing a much smaller and less valuable caravan through a precise 90-degree turn, the standard campsite-parking procedure.

"It's all about confidence," Bernie said after one of my more complete failures, but it was actually about defying every tenet of spatial logic. A mastery of parallel parking isn't going to help: you're better off calling on an aptitude for cutting your own hair. With a left-handed scythe, in the dark. You turn the wheel very slightly one way, and the caravan goes drastically the other; a tiny corrective adjustment and your outfit is swiftly jack-knifed at five-to-one. Then Bernie tells you to do it again using only your big sticky-out mirrors, and this time everything goes wrong in reverse. It's like the Highway Code redrafted by Escher.

The stand-out message of that day: when it comes to opportunities for cartoon misadventure, the caravanner is spoilt for choice. He can forget to crank down the prop stands in each corner, and have the caravan and its contents seesaw destructively to earth when his family climbs in. He can forget to crank them back up before he leaves, doing terrible things to the caravan chassis and anything in its path. He can drive away with the electric cable or the waste-water container still plugged in, or the little front jockey wheel still lowered. He can leave a window ever so slightly open, and arrive at his destination to find the caravan internally slathered with road filth, or omit to attach the "breakaway cable", and arrive to find it gone.

Bernie had already given me a 16-point pre-departure checklist, and attempting to acquire familiarity with the Airstream man's supplementary 12-pointer ("10: prime toilet") meant we lurched out into Chiswick roundabout at the height of Friday's early evening rush hour. The Land Rover acknowledged its monstrous burden with only the slightest hint of inertia; I did my white-faced expressionless best to ignore whatever might be going on at the Airstream's unseen rear, a couple of postcodes behind.

The motorway was better, despite the jolt of panic that accompanied every reflex glance in the rear-view mirror, and the accompanying revelation that we were being aggressively tailgated by a New York subway carriage. Every time we approached a service station a growing number of family members pleaded for refreshment and, later, bladder relief, but they pleaded in vain. A close-quarter manoeuvre before a baying crowd of Happy Eaters just wasn't going to happen.

Other motorists seemed torn between covetous rubber-necking and exhibiting their Clarkson tendency.

Glamorous, huge and shiny it might be, but it was still a caravan. Kids in passing cars would beam and wave, then their dads would cut me up. Only lorry drivers gave their unreserved headlight-flashing approval, and even they dropped back in embarrassment once we left the M40 and its forgiving expanses of carriageway and began waywardly punishing kerbs and mini roundabouts.

To those with partners less fixated on Tudor pageantry, the West Midlands may not seem an obvious choice for a weekend break. Yet something had lured dozens of large white boxes to the Caravan Club's immaculate Chapel Lane site, south of Birmingham, and it can't just have been the newly restored Elizabeth Garden at Kenilworth Castle. The rain that now fell steadily had long been predicted, as had the unseasonal chill in the air. Most caravan owners are campers made good: perhaps part of the fun of caravanning is doing it in weather that makes you really glad you're not in a tent.

The sight of our Zeppelin nosing up to the gates brought faces to many plastic windows. "Caravan parking is a voyeuristic sport," Bernie had warned me, "especially when someone turns up towing a massive silver cigar." My navigational probings proved so instantly and shriekingly inept that within moments the site warden had trotted up and was talking me in - left hand down, full lock, to me, to you. Every order was the precise opposite of my expectation, but in a minute we were geometrically aligned in position A.

Almost at once the first of many curious neighbours squelched over. "I said to the wife, 'Stick your wellies on, love - we've got to have a look at that'." He probably meant the Airstream, rather than the spectacle of a wet family losing a fight with a stubborn jockey wheel. It was 40 minutes before everything was unhitched, cranked down, clipped on and plugged in to my semi-satisfaction, yet despite that and the weather, anticipation was somehow sustained. The electric step hummed out and we piled aboard. A night in a caravan: an experience that life had thus far denied each of us, to the regret of very nearly all.

Fiddling with switches and finding the corkscrew occupied a happy half hour. Then we microwaved ready meals, and ate them perched on those groovy leather banquettes, watching Casualty. Washing up five plates and priming the odd toilet somehow accounted for all our 40 litres of water: over the weekend we had to refill the drum five times. Caravanning is certainly an effective way to confront the reality of human wastefulness, and indeed human waste. But parenting is so much easier when you've got emptying the toilet cassette in your armoury of punishments.

Huw Edwards said goodnight, and in the absence of Freeview and board games the entertainment options instantly withered. This could have proved an awkward juncture in the holiday schedule: a couple of hours of parental us-time ahead, with the only place to enjoy it now waiting to be turned into our children's bed. But the journey had left me spent, and you can't make teenagers go to sleep at 10.30pm on a Friday. My wife and I and our 10-year-old stumbled off to the big bed at the back, and left the other two to enjoy some them-time. It should have been an incendiary situation: a small space and two physically determined young people deep into a phase of mutual hatred. It is a tribute to the convivial mood engendered by Airstream life that we were woken by birdsong not bloodshed.

An unedifying fry-up fuelled us for Kenilworth, and after a complementary side-trip to Warwick Castle we got back to Chapel Lane in time for the Eurovision Song Contest. Despite the mood lighting and surround sound, I was by now detecting the odd echo of my childhood caravanning experience: the mysterious underfloor gurgles, the ropey TV reception, the banged elbows, the cupboard doors dashed into faces. Spill a pint of milk at home and it's a pain. In a caravan it's an apocalypse.

Crammed round the table, we all got alarmingly into Eurovision. With one loud voice we cheered and chortled and roared ugly partisan abuse. The enhanced camaraderie was almost unavoidable: stick a family in a caravan and you bring it together in the most literal sense. Already I could feel the first twinges of regret that in the morning we'd be stepping down that electric step for the last time. But this was tempered with the surging, untrammelled glee that having done so, we would - by very gracious arrangement with the Airstream man - be driving back down the M40 gloriously unencumbered.

Essentials

Airstream (015396 24141; airstreameurope.co.uk) offers European-spec models from £29,950 for the Bambi to £49,715 for the 684 model. Land Yacht Holidays (airstream4rent.co.uk) rents Airstream 684s, like the one Tim used, from £599 for a three-night weekend, £999 for a week. The company delivers it to the site of your choice. Airstream Rentals (0845 070 5990; airstream-rentals.co.uk) offers a luxury service aimed at events - the Gallagher brothers currently have one each on tour - from £1,000 a day. For details of Caravan Club sites see caravanclub.co.uk or call 01342 326 944.