The perfect island for an 'inbetweeners' family trip

With her teenage sons about to fly the nest, Tracey MacLeod faces the challenge of balancing an upscale adult getaway with a raucous lads' holiday... Crete comes to the rescue

- Tracey MacLeod

"Have you come on a lads' holiday by mistake? We haven't come halfway round the world to look at some boring Greek ruins..."

That exchange from The Inbetweeners Movie perfectly captures the tensions underpinning a Cretan holiday. On the one hand, it's the cradle of European civilisation, birthplace of Zeus and home to any number of Minoan ruins and antiquities. On the other hand: paaarty! There's the nightclubs, foam fights and general reputation for off-your-tits mayhem associated with Malia, prime destination for teenage debauchery.

The arrival of mass tourism in the 1980s, with the construction of a new road opening up a stretch of coastline to the east of Heraklion, has made it possible to have two wildly different holiday experiences on Greece's largest island. There's the Crete of upscale villa rentals, designer hotels on turquoise beaches and breathtaking mountain trails. And there's the budget option - fly to Heraklion, dump your bags and start raving.

But what if you want something, well, in between? For what might be our last family holiday before the children fledge into gigantic adults, we need to lure them out of their man-caves with breadcrumb promises of fun and action. A house in the hills above Crete's notorious party strip, picked from luxury villa rental specialists Oliver's Travels, offers the best of both worlds. For the olds, a zen-influenced villa and pool, a white cube of Mykonos-style minimalism beamed down into the dusty backstreets of a mountainside village - but within striking distance (or certainly driven-by-mum distance), the coastal fleshpots of Hersonissos port and Malia, a few kilometres and a couple of centuries away down the hill.