Caravan park or free camp: how to actually decide with kids in the van

We pulled into a rest area outside Nambucca Heads at 4.40pm last winter, still an hour of daylight left, and I watched my son's face fall when he realised there was no jumping pillow, no camp kitchen, and — worse in his eight-year-old eyes — no other kids. We stayed anyway. It was fine. But it taught me something I now use every single travel day: the decision between a free camp and a paid park isn't really about money. It's about what your specific family needs that night, and that changes depending on how tired everyone is, what the dog's done in the car, and whether tomorrow's a driving day or a rest day.

After a few years of towing up and down the east coast with two kids and a kelpie cross, I've stopped treating "free camp vs caravan park" as a values argument (frugal grey nomad vs soft family) and started treating it as a checklist. Here's the version that actually works when you're tired, it's getting dark, and someone in the back seat needs the toilet.

Start with the arrival time, not the budget

The single biggest mistake I made in our first year was chasing free camps to save money on days we were also driving six or seven hours. Free camps reward you when you arrive with daylight and energy to set up properly — level the van, put the annexe walls on, get dinner sorted before the kids unravel. Turn up in the dark, tired, with a dog that needs a walk and a kid who's "starving," and a free camp with no lighting, no bins and an unknown surface underfoot becomes genuinely stressful.

My rule now: if we'll arrive after 4.30pm, or we've driven more than about 350 kilometres, we book a powered site. If we're rolling in by 2pm with the afternoon free, a free camp is back on the table. It sounds simple. It's saved more bad nights than any app or review site has.

What a paid caravan park is actually buying you

I review parks the way a parent uses them, not the way a brochure sells them. A powered site at $45-$65 a night isn't paying for the grass — it's paying for a hot shower at 7am that's actually been cleaned that morning, a camp kitchen where you can make toast without setting up your own stove, and a jumping pillow that burns off forty-five minutes of kid energy before dinner. If a park has all three in genuinely good nick, I'll pay the extra twenty bucks over a bargain-basement site every time. If the amenities are tired and the "camp kitchen" is a bench and a tap, I'm not paying park prices for a glorified powered paddock.

Parks like Easts Beach Holiday Park in Kiama earn their price on exactly this — clean blocks, a genuine kitchen, and a beach walk that tires the dog out before bed. Compare that with a place charging the same money for a dirt site and a demountable toilet block, and the maths changes fast.

What free camping actually gives your kids

The thing free camps offer that no caravan park can — space and quiet, and the chance for kids to make their own fun instead of consuming a jumping pillow and a camp store. Some of our best family memories are from free camps: skipping stones at a riverside spot, a fire (where permitted) with a couple of other travelling families, kids riding bikes on a wide flat clearing with zero traffic. Places like Streaky Bay Foreshore sit in that useful middle ground — low-cost, unfussy, but with just enough infrastructure that it doesn't feel like a gamble with young kids.

The trade-off is obvious: no amenities block means you're managing kids' toilet stops, no powered site means running the fridge off battery and solar, and no other campers means you're the entertainment. If you've already read our piece on bush toilets and grey water habits, you know the drill on keeping a free camp usable for the next family — it matters more with kids around, not less, because you're modelling the behaviour for them too.

The dog changes the equation more than people think

Something a lot of family-camping advice skips: your dog's needs push the decision as much as your kids' do. Some caravan parks charge a pet fee, some ban dogs from the camp kitchen and jumping pillow area entirely, and a few genuinely lovely parks just don't take dogs in peak season. If your dog needs a decent off-lead run before bed to actually settle for the night, a free camp on a big cleared block often beats a tightly packed park where you're on a two-metre lead the whole stay. We've had nights where the dog decision alone tipped us toward a rest area over a park we'd otherwise have booked.

Reading a free camp site before you commit

With kids in the van, I'm looking for four things within the first five minutes of pulling up, before I even start levelling. Is the ground firm and reasonably flat, so the annexe and camp chairs aren't fighting a slope all night? Is there a clear sightline to wherever the kids will play, so I'm not chasing them through scrub to keep eyes on? Is there existing rubbish or fire damage suggesting the site gets rowdy after dark? And is there mobile signal, even one bar, in case something goes wrong overnight. If two of those four fail, we move on rather than gamble on a bad night with kids aboard.

Council-run sites tend to have more predictable infrastructure than a random roadside pull-off — our guide on council rest areas versus national park camping goes into what you're actually getting (or not getting) for free at each type of site, which is worth reading before you assume "free" means "no rules."

The hybrid approach that actually works for us

Honestly, the families who do this well aren't purists either way. We run roughly a 60/40 split toward paid parks during school holidays (when free camps fill up fast and kids want the social scene and the jumping pillow anyway) and flip that toward free camping in shoulder season, when free sites are quieter and park prices haven't dropped yet. If you haven't already, our piece on school holidays versus shoulder season pricing lays out exactly when paid parks are worth it and when they're a rip-off for what you get.

We also always keep one paid night booked every four or five nights on a longer run, purely for laundry, a proper shower for the kids, and a chance to dump grey and black water properly rather than improvise. If you're not sure how to find a dump point, or you're worried about doing it wrong in front of an audience, it's worth a squiz at how to find a dump point (and use one without being that person) before you need it in a hurry.

A quick gut-check before you pull up for the night

I've started asking myself one question at about 3pm each travel day, wherever we are: "if something went wrong tonight — a sick kid, a flat battery, bad weather — would I be comfortable here?" If the honest answer is no, we push on to a park. It's not a scientific method and I won't pretend it is. But six years of family touring has taught me that the nights we regretted weren't the ones where we paid too much. They were the ones where we free camped somewhere unsuitable because we were tired and it was getting dark, and I'd rather pay the $50 than repeat that.

Where you land on any given night will keep shifting depending on the kids' ages, the dog, the season and how far you've driven that day. That's fine. The Big Lap isn't won by picking a side in the free-camp-versus-caravan-park debate — it's won by making the right call for the specific night you're actually having.

— Kellie Nguyen, Family Touring & Parks Editor