Paradise Beach - Gippsland Lakes

Welcome back to another episode. In this one we had to Paradise Beach in the GIppsland Lakes, despite the name we weren't blown away by this campsite/area. It's a great place if you're into fishing though. We stayed at Paradise Beach campground which is run by Parks Victoria. 

If you want to see any footage of this trip you can find us on youtube, search Shire Travels. 

Transcript

Welcome back to Shire travels. in this one, we are heading to the Gippsland lakes region in the east of Victoria, and we're going to stay at paradise beach campground, Loc located around three hours east of Melbourne, it is quite a boring drive there, to be honest. We stopped off and had dinner. It was either at Maui or Teralon, to be honest. I really can't remember. Just stopped off at one of the pubs there. Very standard pub food, nice enough, nice service. And we left after work on a Thursday evening, so by the time we got down to the Gibson Lakes region, it was pretty dark. As we drove into the little, I call it more of a hamlet of Paradise Beach. It's pretty much just a few holiday houses and then the Parks Victoria campground. We noticed there were a lot of rabbits over the road and there were also quite a few kangaroos. They were right by the side of the road, just munching on some grass. We slowed right down. At the last minute, one of them threw itself under our car. We slammed on the brakes. Tom and I both were convincedvinced that we had actually run it over, but I think it was actually the caravan's brakes kicking in and making the car jump around. We eventually stopped. Tom went to get out to get a shovel because we assumed this thing would either be dead. or dying. And it popped up in front of the headlights and just hopped off into the bush. We couldn't quite believe it. We also couldn't quite believe that both kids were still asleep, given that Tom and I have both yelled expleted as this cangaroo went under the car. We then kept on driving, kind of laughing and disbelief. And then about 100 metres away, a deer walked out in front of the road. Now walked very slowly. We think of reflection, it was probably being fed by someone locally because it really wasn't too scared of us. Wandered across the road and then into the bush. After that, we were on edge. There were just rabbits at absolutely everywhere. We kept thinking that something was going to jump out in front of the car again. We only had about another 200 metres to go to get into camp, but it was very tense. This was another campground that I had booked when Parks Victoria were doing their free camping scheme. I had booked this one, and to be honest, all the other ones that I booked just as a test of different places to go in the state, places we had never been to before. We had been to Meetang, which is just north of Paradise Beach before, but apart from that, we hadn't really explored the area. So our expectations weren't too high. We knew the area is very popular for boating and fishing fishing, neither of which we really do, but we thought, we'll just head down there and see what it's like. There were about a dozen campsites in the Paradise Beach campground. And I booked site number six because it was in between two walkways down to the beach. Now, one thing which is really frustrating that we found with a lot of the places that we booked was the website gives you the size of the site, it says whether it's, you know, caravan for friendly or temp friendly. And you just kind of have to trust what they say and maybe they'll have a few pictures of it. The campsite that we chose, number six, was so uneven. I don't understand how they thought it was suitable for caravans. We only have a 14 foot van, and honestly, if you' trying to get a bigger van in there, you'd really struggle, get to drive down a dip, which was quite steep to get in and it out. Honestly, I think this one was more suitable for maybe a tents. I'm not really sure it was just a really awkward sight. The campground itself was fairly busy. I think online it might have said it was booked out, but that was just a common occurrence when the free camping scheme was on. As I said, we rolled in pretty late. We just got ourselves set up, put the kids to bed, and then Tom and I just sat outside and had a couple of drinks and laughed about how hilarious the last 500 beaches of the journey was and how it was a miracle that we didn't kill anything on the way in. The next morning, we woke up and we walked down to the beach via one of the walking tracks that was just behind our caravan, probably only a 200 metre walk down, I'd say, on a formed track and there's also steps going down onto the beach. The beach itself was nice enough. It is definitely not suitable for swimming. It was really rough. As I said before, it's really more of a beach if you're into your fishing. We went down and it had a bit of a look. Whilst it was quite sun sunny, it was incredibly windy, which never really makes so much fun when camping. One thing we did find on the beach, though, was loads and loads of shells. I couldn't believe the amount of shells they had there. Really beautiful shells, all different colours, shapes, and sizes. Back at the caravan, we decided to make ourselves some chocolate pancakes and have a bit of breakfast. Now, in this campsite, they did have a couple of communal fire pits, but you could also just have a fire on the ground if you wanted to. And on our particular campsite, there had been a lot of fires. Now, the ash mixed in with the sand made for a brilliant present time, actually, in terms of, it just got absolutely everywhere, all over our shoes, all over our feet. Anything you put on the ground just got covered in black ash and sands and it was really hard to wash off. Not the end of the world. I don't know when you're camping, you are, you know, you've got to expect a bit of dirt, but this stuff just got into everything. And as I said, it was really difficult to clean off everything. After breakfast, we decided to walk back down to the beach armed with a bucket to collect a whole heap of shells. We brought them back up to the caravan, washed them, dried them, and then our four-year-old had a bit of fun colouring them in. There were some really nice big ones, which had kind of rainbow shapes on them. So our four-year-old coloured them in, as rainbows wrote our name on them. So that was a nice little activity that we did. Now being parked in between the two walkways down to the beach, we did have a few people walking past us, usually people on their way down to do fishing or coming back from fishing, which was actually quite nice. Everyone we met was really approachable. They had told us about the fishing and everything like that. And everyone there was really friendly. That afternoon, we decided to drive about 25 minutes north to the little town of Lochspall. I say town, it's probably more of a village. It's really a few holiday houses. They might actually have a school there. They've've got a foodworks, a nice playground, and it sits on one of the lakes as well and there's a few walks that you can do there. We set ourselves up on a grassy area next to the playground and had a bit of lunch. The Playground there was great. It actually looked quite new and then we did a bit of a walk just down to the lake. There were a heap of swans down there and a few of the kids playing. The lake was actually a really beautiful spot. If it had been warmer, it's the type of place that if you wanted to, you probably could swim. Of course, that didn't matter to a four-year old. It doesn't matter if it's freezing cold or whatever it is. She's just in the water anyway, getting her clothes soaked, as usual, Did we pack spare clothes? No, we didn't. Rookie mistake, always have spare clothes in the car. We then headed to the local foodworks and we got ourselves an ice cream, and we also got ourselves a ball of string because of a lot of the shells that we found naturally had holes in the top of them. And so they made perfect necklaces and bracelets and anklets. Back at the caravan, it was pretty much just like a sweatstrop style production lines of making shell jewellery. Before we got back, though, we took a bit of a random drive just to another town. and on human maps, we could see a track that led kind of out towards one of the lakes. We drove down it for a little bit, but it got fairly narrow and we didn't want to scratch the car up too much. We also weren't 100% sure where we were going, what we'd find. So we turned around and headed back to camp. As I said, back at camp, we just had the shell necklace, sweatshop running for the four-year-old, which was great. Nothing like a bit of child labour to keep them busy. And then we decided to make a small fire and cook up some dinner. We cracked out the air fryer so that the kids could have a few chips and nuggets. It's brilliant, it's so good to use. We have a little one from Kmart. doesn't hold much food in it at all, but it's kind of enough for a couple of kids' dinners. It can run off a,000 wattverter. We've got a 2,000 wattverter in the caravan Choose through the power, but we were only going to be there for another night and so we weren't too worried about burning through the battery. We had dinner and then we sat around the campfire and did some marshmallows, which was really nice. Then it was time for the kids to go to bed and Tom and I just enjoyed sitting around the fire, having a couple of drinks. It was also a full moon that night, which was really cool. The moon provided so much light we didn't really need the outdoor light going at all. The campsite was pretty busy that night, so that would have been the Friday night, but everyone was pretty quiet. There were a few other people who were sat around having a fire. Tom and I did have a little laugh, though, that there were some people set up opposite us, and as they were setting up, sitting down, having their dinner, they had their car headlights on to provide them with some light. And Tom and I were looking at each other, just saying, in the morning, we just bet that they are going to come over and ask if we've got jumper leads. Sure enough, the next morning, they come over, our batteries flat and our car. Do you have any jumper leads? And we did say to them, yeah, you know, if you're going to sit there with your headlights on full for a couple of hours, you're probably going to run down your battery. Of course, we had our jump police with us, so we went over and helped them out. Just something to keep in mind if you don't have any lights at your campsite, running your car battery down, not the best choice. If that's something that you do do though, maybe carry jumper leads with you so that you're not relying on other people to rescue you and help you out. Next morning we drove not too far down the road. There's a small, I'm going to use the word shipwreck here very loosely. There's the remains of an old boat on one of the beaches. It's really just a bit of rusty metal sticking up out the ground. We then decided to head back to Melbourne. We did have another night booked, but the weather, it was just really windy and the kids didn't want to be down on the beach. We didn't have fishing stuff with us. And so we thought, let's just cut our losses, head back to Melbourne early. There was also a Melbourne storm game that night and so we just decided that we'd head back and go to the game. Just as we had packed up the car, another car came in looking for a site, and we said that they were welcome to have ours. It was already booked and done. And so that was a really good timing. Now, on the way out, we drove past Golden Beach. If you're looking for somewhere to stay free in the Gibson Lakes areas, this is probably where we would stay, to be honest, and if we went back there again. So in the middle of Golden Beach, there's the Taurus Information Centre and just behind there, they've got some designated RV parking and also caravan parking, and it's free. It might only be for 24 hours or 48 hours, but as I said, completely free. There's also a foodworks there, there's a playground, heaps of parking. You can also walk over to the beach. There's a very short walkwayway there. And it's a really nice spot, to be honest, it looked a lot nicer than where we stayed at Paradise Beach. Yes, you might be a little bit closer to other campers, but the caravan area looked like it was level. There were a few trees between each side. And to be honest, I'm kind of annoyed that I didn't do a bit more research and that we didn't actually stay there. But want to know for next time, it looks good like a good place to go and free camps these days are becoming more and more scarce. So I reckon that's one to add to the list. Our drive back to Melbourne was extremely uneventful and boring, which I guess is always a good thing. But I just find that Gippsland Highway to just be very, very monotonous. If you want to see any of the footage of the places that I've mentioned, be sure to check us out on YouTube, share travels, and you can also find us on Instagram shire.travels. In the next one, I'll be talking you through some top tips for camping with kids, whether it's tent camping or caravan camping. See you in the next one.