'I swore I'd never do a family camping holiday. This one experience changed my mind.'

If you want to support independent women's media, become a Mamamia subscriber. Get an all-access pass to everything we make, including exclusive podcasts, articles, videos and our exercise app, MOVE.

Sitting on the deck in the shade of a brittle-leaved gum tree, towels and swimmers draped from every banister, I can't help but chuckle at the horror pre-kids me would have felt at the idea of spending a birthday like this. 

In the past three days, I've played mini-golf, supervised six children in a waterpark that seemed designed to cause injury, improvised the cooking of a three-kilo lasagne in a camp kitchen microwave (surprisingly delicious, melted cheese hides all manner of sins), and had one of the best family holidays in recent history. 

All at the one place I swore I'd never deign to stay in: the great Australian caravan park.

Watch: Your must-pack travel essentials. Post continues after video.

The ghost of boring family holidays past.

Call me a snob (I deserve it) but I'd long had the idea that leaving your home to live in a sh*ttier version of your house, wedged in between row after row of other families doing the same thing, was pretty much the worst use of annual leave I could think of. 

This was due in part to some truly ordinary family holidays I'd been on as a kid. Most memorable, perhaps, was the time my parents took us on a two-week caravan road-trip through central NSW, stopping along the way to find the graves of our convict ancestors in towns where the best you could hope for in terms of entertainment was that the local Chinese restaurant would have those cute little plastic jungle animals hanging off the drinks. 

We'd pull up to a caravan park for a few nights at a time, my brother and I would wander down to the pool – if there was one – to sit gingerly on dilapidated old sun loungers clustered around a square of grimy turquoise water and try to work up the nerve to jump in.

If we were lucky, there'd be other kids our age, which was fun once we worked up the nerve to make friends, but mostly we just played Uno around the poky, musty table my parents would unfold underneath the awning, nagging them to let us get hot chips for dinner again.

Caravan parks ain't what they used to be.

So when a couple of girlfriends whose families we schedule a holiday with every year suggested we spend the weekend with them at South West Rocks Holiday Park halfway between our cities on the mid-North coast, I was sceptical. 

We booked a cabin, which I expected to be little more than a more permanent tent, packed a thousand layers (my previous childhood experience of a gusty, unsealed stay over the chilly Easter holidays still fresh in my memory) and hoped for the best. 

What we got instead couldn't have been further from my fears. The cabin — far cuter and more functional than the price suggested — was perched on the edge of a swathe of bushland, from which a mob of kangaroos would emerge each evening to graze and laze.

The water park — a sprawling, three-pool affair carved into a rocky cliff-face and featuring three waterslides and a pirate ship — was the stuff of kids' dreams (and helicopter parents' nightmares).

Image: Supplied.

Because it turns out an entire park designed for families makes it really, really easy for the entire family to kick back.

The magic of busy, happy kids on holidays.

Each family had a cabin, all within easy walking distance of each other, and it took less than an hour for us to get comfortable with the kids scooting up and down the walkways alone to get to each other's places.

This in itself was a revelation: how happy our kids were to step up to the plate and be independent when it meant the ability to roam like a little gang of barefoot pirates.

In turn, something even more magical happened: I finished long, lengthy conversations with my closest friends, because not one child wanted to be with us more than they wanted to be with their holiday wolfpack.

Because we weren't all on top of each other, it felt spacious and luxurious. No one was driving the itinerary, and no one felt pressured. Wander into town for a coffee at the beach? Sure! Take a little downtime and a nap in the middle of the day while the kids watched K-Pop Demon Hunters? Don't mind if we do.

Image: Supplied.

Each family took turns cooking a dinner, which meant two out of the three nights, we simply showed up and were fed delicious food alongside the children. My smug pre-organisation turned to momentary despair when I realised the pre-assembled lasagne I'd brought, big enough to serve 13, would have to be hacked into smaller chunks and microwaved due to the fact that our cabins only had hot plates – no ovens. 

But as it turns out, caravan park me doesn't sweat these things. Caravan park me smiles, her second glass of bubbles in hand, and laughs as she hands out bowls of saucy, steaming slop to a grateful hoard.

Want to learn more family trip hacks? Read these next:

• 'I swore I'd never do a "wellness" holiday. Then this one fixed my burnout.'

• 'I've perfected the art of the Gold Coast girls' trip. Here's my tried and tested itinerary.'

• 'You only need to pack these 12 essentials for your next tropical beach holiday.'

Feature image: Supplied.