Crossing the border to the state of Victoria. First stop is Mallacoota, a small town in the East Gippsland region and the lowest point of South-East of Australia. Although it’s officially summer, the weather in the last few days is quite cold, so we had to warm up playing football at a little picnic area by the beach. Later on we started to head West along the coast towards Melbourne, until we got to a nearly deserted camping area at Cape Conran and immediately fell in love in this place. So much that we decided to make this our first real camping stop for the night – no water, no power, self contained. We made our first camp fire and clearly the kids were super excited (we should have done it earlier) and pulled out a bag of marshmallows from the pantry. A short walk through the bush led us to an isolated beach and it was so much FUN we realised that we’re ready for the real deal – bush camping in remote Australia.

The following day, we’ve spent half a day at the camp and drove off to the closest service station using our very last drops of petrol. It’s funny – we brought two jericans of petrol with us on the road, but we haven’t used them yet, as we thought it won’t be necessary until we get to the outback. Well, we were wrong. The service station is located in a sleepy town called Marlo and we literally needed to stop on the side on the road, turn off the engine to save petrol, and wait for someone to drive past to ask them where is the nearest, and I mean as near as possible, service station. So we ended up in this nearly deserted shop that also sells petrol, and they were just as surprised to see us.

With our new stock of petrol we made it to Lakes Entrance and stopped at the top of the hill to embrace the stunning views below of a chain of lakes, peninsulas and the ocean. Then we kept going past the little town of Metung and onto the caravan park at Eagle Point right by the lake. Interestingly they got the world’s largest collection of dragonflies one would ever see. We stayed for the night, right by the beautiful lake, almost on our own. When I woke up the following morning, a little late than usual, I found my wife and kids sitting outside on a picnic blanket with their PJs on, playing board games and creating memories to the album. We had a fun breakfast – how can it not be fun when you got the whole lake shore to yourself – and later on went for a drive around to explore the neighborhood. It’s a beautiful sunny day, the more you look around the more lakes you find.

Although with all this natural beauty, the highlight of the day for our children was no other than a … playground. To be fair, it was huge, it had an Omega, plus possibly the longest slide in Australia. If the wind didn’t pick up late in the arvo, we would have stayed there forever. Back in the caravan park, we found enough time for homeschooling, a snooker match, soccer and dinner.