Holiday Park Activities For Grey Nomads

FISHING

With a huge number of modern holiday parks offering some form of water frontage – whether it’s absolute beach frontage, lakeside camping, a meandering river, or even a dam, being able to fish from within your holiday park is often a given these days. In fact, many holiday parks even encourage it, offering resident-only boat ramps, fish-cleaning facilities, valuable local knowledge, and even gear available for hire if you don’t have your own.

Just remember to be a good neighbour and don’t leave your bait – or your catch – in the communal camp kitchen!

RESTAURANTS

Gone are the days when your only dining option within a caravan park was a snag you cooked yourself or a packet of dried pasta from the office ‘shop’. These days, many holiday parks are offering top-class restaurants on-site to cater for hungry – but discerning – diners.

Arrived late after a long day of driving and can’t face firing up the camp oven or eating another meal of leftovers but, equally, not in the mood to dress up, unhitch and drive into town for a local bite? In many cases, you won’t have to, as lot of caravan parks now have onsite restaurants for residents.

Even if there’s not a formal restaurant within the park, you might find the park holding regular ‘camp cookouts’, pizza parties or even roast dinners where, for the fraction of the price of a restaurant meal, you can let someone else do the cooking for you!

OUTDOOR CINEMA

No one goes camping to spend hours cooped up inside watching TV or movies (unless the weather demands it) but, sometimes, there’s nothing better in the summer than spending an evening watching a film under the stars. While many towns offer community outdoor cinemas, some holiday parks are also getting in on the act and, if you’re in the right place at the right time (usually summer school holidays), you might find yourself able to catch the latest blockbuster, happy hour drink in hand, from the comfort of your own camp chair!

POOLSIDE COCKTAIL BAR

Swimming pools and waterparks can be the bane of some nomads’ holiday park experiences, especially during holidays when the parks are teeming with children, However, some holiday parks are cottoning on to this fact and providing a more ‘adult’ experience in the form of swim-up, poolside cocktails bars within their swimming pools. You must be crazy, I hear you say! And while this feature might be more at home in a Balinese resort, it actually does exist in a couple of parks in Australia – you just have to know where to look!

MEET THE AUTHOR

Laura Gray

An RV journalist working across Australia’s premier caravanning and camping magazines for the past five years, Laura is also a judge at the annual Best Aussie Vans awards. She has been camping in the great outdoors since the of two, when she was packed, by day, into a Toyota LiteAce van and, by night, into a brown canvas tent with her parents and two siblings for an extended trip around the vast playground that is northern Western Australia.