Lorne - Great Ocean Road Free Camping

Welcome back to another episode! In this one we travel down the Great Ocean Road to Jamieson Creek Campground just south of Lorne. We loved our stay here and I'll be talking you through:

- The campground

- Koalas!

- Rude Tourist Information staff...

- Erskine Falls

- Lorne

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Transcript

Welcome back to Shire travels. in this one we are heading down the gray ocean road to Lorne. The gray ocean road is probably one of the most famous drives in Victoria, heads out from Melbourne and goes past towns like Torquay, Anglesey, Lorne, Wye River, all the way down to the 12 Apostles. We weren't travelling the whole way down. Instead, we were stopping in Lorne. We stayed at Jamon Creek campground, and it's about 15, 20 minutes just south of Lorne. This is another Parks Vic campsite, and once again, we have booked it as part of the government's free camping scheme. I believe if you stay there now, it's about $17 a night, and I think it is well worth it. We left late after work and rolled into camp, but when it was dark, we half expected there to be someone in our campsite because it is so busy down there. However, luckily there was no one there. And we quickly drove in and got ourselves set up. It is so good having the caravan. It literally takes us about 10 minutes to park, put the legs down, put the roof up, and get the kids into bed. Jamieson Creek campground, it has about 20 camps sites. There's a mixture of sites specifically for tents and then one's more suited for cars and caravans. We stayed in site five There were a couple of sites that were earmarked on the website for large caravans. I had actually thought that site 5 looked a bit better. It was much wider. And when we got there, I think it was actually the perfect spot. If you're heading down there with a caravan, I think definitely look at site five. The beneficial thing was that opposite the campsite, kind of to the right, was a track that leads up to a four drive track. This meant that it was really easy to reverse in. We just drove up the track and then back into our campsite. We also had room to park the car just in front of the caravan. Other people who were on site around us, which did say they were suitable for caravans, had to park their car just off the road horizontally. It was a little bit squishy, but for us on site five, it was fine. The good thing about being on this one as well, it was at the end of the row of campsite, so we didn't have any neighbours to the right of us. And it also had a fire pit just in front of it as well. Now, they are communal fire pits, but actually that was great. We met some really nice travellers down there. Now, this campsite is just off the great ocean road. Now, the trek into it is a little bit steep and bumpy, but it's nothing there. A little bit of right foot won't solve. The only thing to watch out for is it is pretty narrow, so just look out for cars coming the other way. And also the wildlife, there are a few resident wallabies there, so look out for them as well. Now, being a parks fit campsite, it doesn't have any power there or water. They are just unpowered kind of bush camps. It's saying that is quite a small campground. There isn't too much in between campers. In saying that, though, this was a really nice campsite. It looked like the parks Department had spent a bit of time to plant a few small plants in between campsites. It was really neat, tidy, clean. We were very impressed. But the selling point for it was it has a sunrise viewing area, so so it looks over the great ocean road and obviously the ocean and it is absolutely beautiful. There's some lovely seats there that are carved out of stones. There's picnic benches, electric barbeques, it's a a really special spot. Now, as I mentioned, they do have toets there. However, they don't have bins, so just make sure that you're taking out what you're bringing with you. We stayed down there at the start of March, and while usually the weather isn't too bad for us, we just had, once again, I feel like I said this all the time, we had a mixed bag of everything, sunny one minute, rainy and cloudy the next. Our first morning at the campsite, we went to the sunrise view viewing area and it was absolutely beautiful. We then hung around camp for a little bit and then we spotted a koala. It was about 50 metres from our caravan, not too high up in a tree. It was really great to see. Kids were very excited. This was actually the first time that I'd seen koalas on the great ocean road too. Often when you drive down there, you see the signs for koalas and I always thought maybe it was just a little bit of a ploy for tourists, but no, they are actually down there. With the weather not looking the best, we decided to head into Lorne Town to have some lunch. Now, there's a playground of the foreshore area. It's a really nice spot And opposite there, there is an op shop. Now, I love op shopping, so I thought I'd go in and see if I can get myself a bargain. Oh, how wrong I was. I think it's most expensive op shop I've ever been to. A very well worn, crappy country road t-shirt will cost you about $15, $20 in there. One of the rare occasions where I've left an op shop empty-handed. We got some lunch from the local bakery and then ate it near the playground. This attracted a lot of local cockatoos. Just be aware if you are a little bit scared of birds, they will come over and pretty much hop up into your pram if you've got it or if you've got food, they'll come over and just try and pinch out of your hands. After we had had a bit of lunch, we then just walked down to the beach. The weather wasn't great. It was very overcast, but it was just a good chance to let the kids have a little bit of a runaround on the beach. Also down on the grassy foreshore area, they had like a little teepee that was made out of sticks, just something else to have a bit of a look at. We then decided to head to the tourist Information centre. We knew we wanted to go to one of the waterfalls in the area that afternoon, and so we wanted to work out which one was going to be the best for young kids. Our experience at the Trist Information Centre was not good. They were kind of beyond unhelpful, and to be honest, quite rude. When we told them where we were staying at Jameson Creek campground, they went off on a bit of a rant about the how people shouldn't be allowed to stay there because it's a bushfire risk and it's really unsafe and blah, blah, blah. And Tom and I were like, okay, this is like nothing to do with us. We don't run the campsite. I was then asking them about the four-wel driveet track that runs behind the campsite, kind of what it's like, where does it go to? And they said, oh, no, it's shut. And I said, oh, I've seen cars coming up and down there. They said, no, if you walk up, you'll see there's a gate and it's shut. I then proceeded to tell them that I had walked up there because that's where the koala was and the gate was open. They just kept on going on. No, it's shut and people shouldn't be staying there and all the rest of it. Safe to say we left there feeling like we weren't the type of tourists that they wanted in the town. We weren't staying in their $300 a night apartments and we were driving at a four-wheel drive and they were basically looking down their nose at it us. So we decided to leave, got a couple of maps though before we did and headed to Erskine Falls. This waterfall is absolutely stunning. There's a viewing area at the top, and then you can go down some stairs to kind of near the bottom. You are quite away from the waterfall, but there's a really nice viewing platform there. We put our youngest in the backpack carrier and there's a four-year-old, we kind of just had to carry her up and down the steps. It wasn't too bad. There's also some nice little creeks around there that you can walk down to. In summer, maybe it could be a spot to swim at, but first it was just a bit too cold that day. Now, after that very strenuous, probably 500 metre walk, we then decided to go into Lorne Town and have dinner at the pub. We had dinner at the Lorne Hotel and we just ate in their bistro. Look, it was kind of just your standard pub food. They actually did some nice cocktails there and the bistro area has floor to ceiling windows, if you're sat inside like we were and you can see out over the beach and it's really beautiful. After dinner, we decided to head down to the beach as the sun had poked its head out and again just gave the kids a bit of a chance to run around on the beach and burn off a bit of energy. Back at camp, we lit a fire. The kids got to a roast their marshmallows, and then once they were in bed, it was our chance to sit around and have a conversation with some of the other travellers that were down there. This of all the campsites that we've stayed in recently, the parks big ones, especially, this was the most social one. There was lots of opportunities to talk to other travellers, see where they've been, get a bit of advice. It was really good. The next morning, when we woke up again Wednesday, to the beautiful sunrise viewing area. Now, what I forgot to mention was the morning before and this morning, and I'm pretty sure on our last day as well, the rangers came round every morning and they checked all our booking details. Now, I'm not sure if this normally happens, if it's normal that they're there every single day. But I think on this occasion, it was because that we were there as part of the Victorian government's free camping scheme. Every single site said it was booked out. And yet when you went down there, there were a handful of sites that were still available. So I think they were just making sure that people who were parked in spots were actually meant to be there. The Rangers were super helpful. We were telling them about the experience that we had at the Tourist Information Centre and they kind of rolled their eyes. They actually gave us some really good advice on the forwardel drive track that was behind the campsite. They said that while it wouldn't be too difficult to do by ourselves, it had been raining a couple of days prior and the track could get really slippery. That was great. Good advice for us to know, and we decided not to do it. Now, as I mentioned before, even though the campground said it was fully booked, there were some sites that were free where people didn't turn up. We found that in the evening and kind of into the night, people who would drive past the campground would stick their head in and just see if there were some spare sights. And often people would just quickly tuck themselves in just for the evening. And then before the rangers came round, they would head off. The weather that day was looking really good. It was a bit windy, but the sun was out and we decided to head just down the road to a bit of an inlet that we had seen. The Great Ocean Road kind of looped around it. So it was fairly busy with car always, but apart from that, it was a really nice spot, just had a shallow stream running through it out to the ocean, which was perfect for the kids to have a bit of a splash. That afternoon, when our youngest needed to have a nap, I just stayed back at the campsite, sat in the sun, and had a drink. It was a very peaceful and relaxing. Tom took our oldest out for a bit of a drive and they went back into town to the playground. Once again that evening, we decided to have a campfire. The kids always find it really fun to go around and find marshmallow sticks and other things that they can put onto the fire. The resident campsite wallabies also came around as well, getting up really close to everyone's caravans, and tents. It was very cute. Once again, we sat around the fire that evening and talked to some fellow travellers. Even though we were down there in March, it was still really cold and it was so great at being able to have a fire. The fire pits provided were really decent as well, proper big metal ones. They also had barbeque plates on them and bits where you could kind of hook over a kettle if you needed to boil the kettle as well. While the campground was quite sociable in saying that it was pretty quiet, most people tended to head off to bed around 11 o'clock. There were a few other cars that came in, not just travellers looking for somewhere to stay the night. We also saw the SES drive-by, the police drive-by, or just doing a bit of a loop of the campground, just seeing what's going on. The next morning, we woke up and it was cold and raining, probably the worst conditions to try and pack up in. We got it done as quickly as we could and a bit of a tip. We usually just put the kids in the car when we're doing our pack up, they're're fairly happy to just sit there and be tucked up in their seats rather than hanging around the campground while we're trying to pack everything away in the rain. We hit the road and started heading back to Melbourne, and on the way back, we stopped in at Torquay to get some lunch. And I have to say, in terms of being able to find someone to park the car and caravan, it was near on impossible, you kind of get a little bit of a vibe at some of these towns on the Great Ocean Road that they don't want caravans being down there. There was just nowhere to park. We just had to find some random side street miles away from cafes. We got something from the bakery and then went to the playground there, which was actually really good. We really enjoyed our time staying at Jamieson Creek campground and I'd highly recommend it if you are heading down the Great Ocean Road. I imagine during peak Times school holidays it would book out really quickly. So get onto it as quickly as you can. This is somewhere we would definitely stay again and would recommend it. Out of all the Parks campsites that we've stayed at, I think this is probably the best one. It's also a really convenient spot to base yourself on the Great Ocean Road. As I said, it's about 15 minutes from Lorne. You're not too far from Wye River. There's so many things to see and do in that area. We only went and saw one waterfall, I think there's about five in about a 15, 20 minute radius. If you're looking for something just a little bit more casual, though, there is another campground down at Wye River, again, run by Parks Vic. It's much bigger, though, and there's grassy sides as opposed to gravel that we were on at Jamieson Creek. So that's another option to check out as well. It's a good spot if you want to be that little bit closer to the 12 apostsles. If you'd like to see any footage of what I've mentioned in this podcast, make sure you check us out on YouTube, Shire Travels, and you can also find us on Instagram, Shire.travels. Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next one.