[sgt_doofey]

Well, we're back now from our camping at Halls Gap.
Didn't manage to get out to see many sites due to the weather being poor and having young kids. We couldn't tackle the larger walks to see things. It's definitely a place we'll go back to in a few years time when the kids are older and can walk longer distances.
Got to the Boroka and Reid lookouts along with McKenzie Falls.

As for the camping side of things, the camper trailer was a god send, especially with the weather. Had some shelter we could use when it rained and could put the kids inside with a movie on to keep them entertained and warm due to us packing a little blow heater. (powered site for the win!)

Cooking wise, our little Wanderer camp stove did the trick. We used that most of the time and it never missed a beat. Is a little on the small side, so to accommodate the crockery properly, we just put the wind shields down and it was fine. Would be nice to have a bigger one, but it'll do for now.

The Halls Gap Caravan Park itself was a pretty good facility. The site we had was a powered site which was meant to be grass but was mostly dirt/mud as the grass coverage wasn't that great. The facilities themselves were pretty good, albeit a little dated, but most of Halls Gap looks pretty dated these days. Showers were nice and hot and had great water pressure. It would have been good if the toilet/shower block was heated, but we didn't freeze.
They have designated fire pits where you can have fires. Ours was across the road near the creek, so wasn't on site, but as we were the only people camping in our area, there wasn't any traffic that we had to worry about.
There is a public playground nearby that the kids enjoyed playing on and we were right across the road from the shops.
We saw heaps of Kangaroos. They wandered around the caravan park and would come right up to you in the evenings. Just be wary of leaving food out, as they do tend to scavenge a bit.
It was a great location to base ourselves in for a family camping trip. We would go back there again.

Things learned:
- check to make sure pegs and guy ropes are packed. Turns out that we didn't have the guy ropes for the annex so I had to go buy some. I had also packed some spare pegs, so ended up using those.

- If you want good, cheap cooking utensils for camping, then check out KMart. I grabbed tongs and spatula from them for $1.50 each and they're brilliant!

- if you're camping in a group then you need shelter. We had a gazebo that our friends bought and we put up a tarp all off the annex of the camper trailer which gave us reasonable shelter from the rain. It would have been great to have another tarp that we could have extended out to make a floor to help stop the mud and dirt from getting in to the camper trailer, but the kids were reasonably good in taking their shoes off before going inside.

Even with the bad weather we had, we all had a good time and we've vowed to try and make this an annual event at least. That is, us friends catching up via camping as we're in Adelaide and they're in Melbourne, so Halls Gap was half way. The wife and I enjoyed it, the kids had a great time, so we'll definitely do that again.