Frenchmans Creek Campground - Big River - Victorian High Country

Welcome back to another episode, in this one we head to Frenchmans Creek Campground located on Big River Road. We enjoy a couple night of below freezing bush camping and venture to the top of Mt Terrible (spoiler alert, it was not terrible). If you want to see any footage from this weeks episode search Shire Travels on Youtube.

Transcript

Welcome back to Shire Travels. In this one, we are heading to Frenchman's Greek campground. This is located on Big River Road, and it's around about 3 hours northeast of Melbourne. Now, if you're not quite sure where Big River Road is, it's just south of Lake Mountain Alpine Resort, quite close to Mount Terrible, and the road is northeast of the Yarra Ranges National Park. Big River Road itself is a gravel road, fairly well formed. Can be a little bit narrow in places, but if you're towing a caravan, there are plenty of places for people to pull over and let you pass. As you might have guessed from the name, Big River Road runs alongside the Big River. There are plenty of different campsites along this road that will suit all different setups. We drove up and down the road a couple of times, just trying to find the best spot for us. There are some smaller camps, which would suit tents or rooftop tents. First, with the caravan. We needed to find somewhere with a bit more space to turn around. And so we decided to stay at Frenchman's Creek campground. Now, these campsites are located in the Big River state park, I believe it's called. They are very basic campsites. Some have dropped toilets. Most of them have fire pits, but that's about it. There aren't really any other facilities. Most of the campsites along the road are fairly well level, a couple of the smaller ones have quite steep inclines to get in and out of them. Frenchman's Creek was great. There were lots of different options to choose where to stay. We positioned ourselves kind of in the back right hand corner as you drive in. There's a small creek, which I'm going to assume is Frenchman's Creek that runs to the right hand side, and then Big River is to the left hand side. The campsite itself was fairly well maintained, in terms of rubbish and things like that, I was quite surprised that it was pretty clean. The fire pits that they had there as well were kind of concrete squares in the floor and they all looked like they were pretty new, and even the toilets themselves went in too bad of condition. And as I mentioned, no facilities in terms of water or power, we're with Vodafone and we didn't have any phone reception there. We've actually been using our zolio to send messages to friends and family when we're going camping with them, if we're out of film reception already. And this has been really useful. Sometimes when we go camping, we're not quite sure which camp site we're going to be at. And so we could hop on the zolio and send a quick message to let people know which campground we're at. For this trip, we had Tom's brother and his family with us and they have a camper trailer and they also have 2 dogs. So to note, the campground is also dog friendly. Another thing to quickly note is that this campsite is free. We got to camp and we quickly set up. Now that night it was going to get down to -one. Both nights were going to be below freezing. Fortunately, we have the diesel heater in the caravan, but we still wanted to be able to sit outside at night and enjoy a lovely warm fire. Now there was a fair bit of chop down wood in the campsite. However, it was all very green. I'm not quite sure what people expected to cut down a living tree and then find that it was perfectly burnable firewood in the middle. Nope, all very green. So Tom went for a bit of a drive along the road and found quite a few big pieces of wood to drag back to the campsite. And while we waited for the other half of our party to arrive, Tom chopped up the firewood and got a small fire started and also stacked up the chopped wood and expert to try it and dry it out. The new fire pits that they've got there are concrete, as I mentioned before, but they've got quite a wide base to them, and so you can actually stack the firewood around it to dry it out. If you want to know what I'm talking about. Check out our video on YouTube. Just search for shire travels. Now, just behind where our caravan was, you could walk down to Big River. It was probably about a 20, 32nd walk to get down there. And also Frenchman's Creek was right behind our caravan. This would be a really beautiful spot to come to in summer. I'm not quite sure if I'd swim in Big River in that particular spot. It did look quite deep, but the creek that runs behind it was quite shallow and it would be a really nice spot to cool off. There's lots of gum trees around there for shade as well. Now we had the kids pretty well prepared for a cold weekend away. They both have snow suits or snow pants and gloves, hats, all those sorts of things. We also bring a disco ball so that they can have a bit of a party and warm up in the evening. We also had the fire going, and then, as I mentioned before, we had the diesel heater in the caravan, and we just make sure we bring extra layers, sleep bags, everything to try and minimise the whinging of, and cold. For this trip. I'd even purchased a king's power bank. It's a 24 amp power bank. And I bought it basically. They had a combo deal, of course. If you know kings, they are famous for their combo deals. They had the power bank, they also had a 12 volt electric blanket that you could plug into it, which I thought would be ideal, which to be honest, I didn't actually use it that much because when you sat next to the fire, it's warm enough. But it was just something a little bit extra, could sit the kids with me on the chair and wrap them up in the warm blanket, and it actually went pretty well. Yeah, the good thing that the power bank has is built in light, so it has white light and it also has amber light, which is ideal to pop in the kitchen. Our kitchen only has white light and it's a bit annoying at night for all the bugs. So to have that ember light in there was great. The cost for the blanket and the power pack was about $200, which isn't too bad really. I mean, can you put a price on being warm? I don't think so. The next morning we got up and once we had defrosted, we decided to drive up to Mount Terrible. There was actually a lot of low lying cloud or fog around and the drive up was really nice going through the clouds. We then drove up above the clouds and got some amazing drone footage. Looking out over the mountains. It was really beautiful on top of the clouds. The drive up to Mount Terrible, wasn't that difficult. A little bit rocky in places and because there had been rain and some pieces just don't get sunlight, it was a little bit slippery, but really nothing too bad. We made it up to the top of Mount Terrible and the views were just stunning. At the top of Mount Terrible. There's an area where you can park your car, a hut and some pitnip benches and just some beautiful views over all the mountain tops. We could even see snow in the distance. That's how cold it was. We had a bit of a look around the hurt and then decided to have an early lunch on top of the mountain. For lunch. We just did something quite basic. The kids had sandwiches and we also had some biscuits and cheese. It's quite a popular spot and there were plenty of people coming and going. One thing to know as well is that it's also dog friendly. There aren't any facilities at the top, though. There is the hurt which is have a fire inside, but apart from that, there's no water and there's no toilet, so it's something to keep in mind. We then headed back down the mountain and back to camp and we just let the kids ride their bikes around and got started on making that fire nice and hot early. We found even more firewood on the way back and Tom and his brother spend a bit of time chopping it all up. There were lots of little fairy wrens in the campsite and they had a great time hopping round, picking up all the grubs that fell out of the wood when it was cut up. The campsite on a Friday night had been quite quiet. There was one other group that was all the way down the other end of the campsite and we couldn't hear them at all. It was quite interesting Saturday afternoon, a load of campers pulled in, got set up, and then left very early the next morning, which is a little bit strange. It's quite far to come just for one night. But in saying that, even with all those other campers there, we really couldn't hear them, they had a fire going, but we could hardly see it. It's a great spot, even though it is fairly easy to access. There's plenty of places to spread out and find your own spot. That night, we just enjoyed another night set around the fire. Now, if you're heading out this way to come camping and perhaps hoping to see some wildlife, kangaroos, wombats, those sorts of things. I don't think you're going to have much luck seeing them here. It is dog friendly, so we had a couple of dogs with us and that might be why we didn't get to see much wildlife, but it's also a very popular spot for hunting. It's pretty common to see youtes driving by with dog boxes on the back and lots of dogs barking their head off. And also to see people walking up and down the road with their radios looking for their dogs, something to be aware of as well as you're driving along the road that you could come around the corner and find someone looking for their dog or a card pulled over in a bit of an awkward spot. There's lots of hunting that happens in there. So probably not the best spot if you are going to look for wildlife, but if you're going there to hunt the wildlife, like the deer, then it probably is a really good spot. In saying that, though, we did speak to a couple of hunters that we went past and none of them had any luck. We woke up the next morning and it was time to head home. We just had a bit of a walk behind the caravan again down to the river. Just have a little bit of a look around. It was also my birthday, so we whipped up a couple of chocolate pancakes and stuck a couple of candles in them, and then it was time to start packing up, packing up the caravan is so easy. It's really good. It just makes that camping trip. A bit more enjoyable and manageable with the kids. We got everything packed up and then went down to the creek to get a bucket of water and made sure that our fire was put out, and then it was time to start driving home. We loved our stay here at Frenchman's Creek campground. It's a spot that we would definitely look to come back to. As I said before, in summer it would be a great spot, have a bit of a splash around in the creek, but I do imagine it would get quite busy. As I said, it is 2 wheel drive accessible. I'd also be keen to check out a couple more of the campsites along there just to see if any of the other ones are a bit better. But for us at Frenchman's Creek, ticked all the boxes. If you'd like to see any of the footage from our trip to Frenchman's Creek, check out our YouTube, just search for Shire Travels and I'll see you in the next one.