A family lap of the Bellarine and Great Ocean Road worth slowing down for

We did the Bellarine and the first stretch of the Great Ocean Road over a ten-day October school holidays a couple of years back, and I still reckon it's one of the most underrated family caravan loops on the east-ish coast. Everyone talks about the Great Ocean Road as a bucket-list drive you smash out in two days from Melbourne. Do that with two kids under ten in the back and a dog wedged between eskies and you'll want to turn around by Anglesea.

The trick with this region is that it's short enough to do properly without burning ten days of straight driving, but varied enough that the kids don't hit the "are we there yet" wall on day three. Ocean Grove, Barwon Heads, Torquay, Anglesea, Lorne, Apollo Bay. You could tow the whole loop in a long weekend if you had to, but you shouldn't, because the whole point is stopping.

Why the Bellarine first, not straight to the Great Ocean Road

Most people towing from Melbourne skip the Bellarine Peninsula entirely and beeline for Torquay. I think that's a mistake with young kids. The Bellarine gives you calm bay water, short drives between towns, and camp kitchens that are actually set up for families rather than surfers passing through.

Hodgson Street in Ocean Grove is where we base ourselves — a strip of cafes and a proper IGA, five minutes' walk from Point Lonsdale-facing flat sand where our son learned to bodyboard without me white-knuckling the whole time. Barwon Heads, fifteen minutes further on, has the calmer river-mouth swimming that's genuinely toddler-safe on a rising tide, plus the pub everyone raves about (deservedly).

Where we actually stayed

We're not a resort family and I don't chase five-star reviews. What I check first at 7am is whether the amenities block is clean and whether there's a jumping pillow that isn't held together with gaffer tape. On this loop the standout for us, oddly, wasn't on the peninsula at all — it was further south. If you're doing the wider east coast run as part of a longer trip, our stay at Easts Beach Holiday Park, Kiama earlier that same trip set a high bar for beachfront family parks, and I kept comparing everything on the Bellarine to it. Nothing quite matched the setting, but a couple of the smaller peninsula parks had better camp kitchens — proper gas burners, not just a sink and a shelter.

Powered sites around Ocean Grove and Barwon Heads run roughly $55–75 a night in shoulder season, more like $90–110 in peak summer and Easter. Worth it for us specifically because of the shade and the ten-metre walk to a working toilet block at 2am with a kid who needed one. If you're penny-pinching, there are unpowered sites $20–30 cheaper, but with a caravan full of school-age kids and a fridge that needs to stay cold, I pay the extra. If you want the maths on what that adds up to over a year of touring, we've actually run the numbers in what caravan park fees actually cost over a year of touring.

Torquay and Bells Beach without the surf-culture overwhelm

Torquay markets itself hard as a surf town and if your kids aren't into boards it can feel like you're missing the point. We found the trick is to treat it as a half-day stop, not a base. The Surf World Museum on Beach Road fills an hour on a grey morning, and Fishermans Beach has calmer water than the main surf break if you've got littlies who just want to paddle.

Bells Beach itself is a lookout stop, not a swimming beach — rips there are serious and it's not the place to let kids near the water unsupervised. We watched from the car park, took the photo, moved on. Fifteen minutes well spent, not a whole afternoon.

Anglesea to Lorne: the stretch that earns the drive

This is where the Great Ocean Road starts doing what it's famous for — cliffs on one side, ocean on the other, and a road that punishes a driver who isn't paying attention to a caravan's sway in the wind gusts off the water. Take it slow. There's no need to be anywhere by a set time on this stretch and the pull-offs are genuinely worth using, not just for photos but to let faster traffic through so you're not the reason for a queue of twelve cars.

Anglesea has a golf course famous for kangaroos grazing the fairways most afternoons, which sounds like a tourist line until you actually see forty roos on the ninth green at 4pm. Free, no bookings, kids loved it more than anything we paid for that week.

Lorne itself gets busy — genuinely busy — over summer and Easter, so if you're travelling in peak season book well ahead or expect to be turned away from the popular parks. Mountjoy Parade is the main strip and it's worth a wander for fish and chips by the pier, but I wouldn't base a family stay there in January without a booking made months out.

Apollo Bay as the turnaround point

We treated Apollo Bay as our furthest point rather than pushing on to the Twelve Apostles with young kids in tow — that's a longer, twistier drive and honestly better suited to a day trip without the van attached, or a separate leg if you're continuing further west. Apollo Bay's foreshore camping area and the harbour walk gave the kids somewhere to burn energy that wasn't a screen, and the local bakery on the main street did more to keep morale up on a wet morning than anything else on the trip.

If your loop is part of a bigger east coast run rather than a standalone Victorian trip, this region slots in neatly at either end of the East Coast Run: Melbourne to Cairns — a good few days to decompress before or after the longer haul north.

What I'd do differently next time

Honestly, I'd give Barwon Heads an extra night. We rushed it in favour of more time in Lorne, and in hindsight the kids got more genuine downtime — swimming, bike riding, actual boredom that turned into imaginative play — out of the quieter Bellarine towns than the more scenic but busier stretch further south. That's a mildly unpopular opinion among people who rave about Lorne, but I'd rather my kids remember jumping off a jetty than another cliff-top lookout they were dragged out of the van to look at for ninety seconds.

Fuel-wise this loop is short enough that budgeting isn't the issue it is on a longer trip — if you're combining it with something bigger, our fuel budgeting numbers for the Big Lap are still a useful reference for tank sizing and diesel price swings, even on a trip this size.

According to the Bureau of Meteorology's Geelong forecast district data, this stretch of coast sees its calmest, driest conditions typically outside the school holiday peaks — March-April and September-October are genuinely the sweet spot for towing this loop with kids, both for weather and for parks not being booked solid. Tourism Victoria's regional visitor data backs up what we saw on the ground: summer numbers on this stretch spike hard, and shoulder season gives you the same coastline with a third of the traffic.

Getting the logistics right

This loop is compact enough — roughly 130km end to end from Ocean Grove to Apollo Bay — that you don't need to overthink towing logistics the way you would heading remote. But the road itself demands respect: narrow shoulders, blind corners, and cyclists sharing the same tight bitumen as your rig. Slow down before Lorne, not after you've already had a fright.

If you're timing this around school holidays as part of a longer trip, it's worth reading our notes on planning around school holiday windows — the same booking-ahead logic that applies to a six-month lap applies just as much to a ten-day Victorian coastal run.