Awaken the child within at Ocean Beach Holiday Resort

Parenthood changes your life. It’s natural to rail against this change, to try to retain your old routine wherever possible, but it’s like being caught in quicksand – struggling only makes things worse. My wife and I have never been ‘Central Coast’ people, but we want a short break and our luggage includes a 15-month-old boy, so we’re driving to Ocean Beach Holiday Park at Umina Beach.

We’re in cabin 501, a plantation cottage and one of the few remaining when we made our last-minute school holidays booking. It’s located next to the park’s busiest crossroad, and rom our deck we view an endless procession of bikes, scooters, prams, cars and pedestrians. I find myself enjoying the bustle of it all, which is not usually like me, and 501 has some other advantages. It’s literally across the road from the beach, games room, and the all-important café/takeaway. The pool area isn’t much further off, nor is ‘The Barn’, which is the hub for kids’ activities.

Once we’ve unpacked the car, we head for the beach. The section that runs parallel to the park is an off-leash area and joyful dogs bound past as Chloe and Cody build sandcastles and gather buckets of water in the shorebreakers.

When dusk settles in, we dust off the sand and make the short drive out to Ettalong Diggers for dinner. Clubs with an eye to the future have become family-friendly and Ettalong Diggers has taken it to the max with a play area that looks like it was transplanted from the local Macca’s. Chloe, who is four, makes good use of it while waiting for her fish and chips.

Sleeping in is just a fond memory for parents of a 15-month-old, so not long after 7am the kids and I set out in search of coffee. The Beach Hut café at the holiday park isn’t open until 8am and, for a caffeine junkie like me, that’s too long to wait. Lucky for us, Jasmine Greens keeps early-bird hours and is only a short walk from the park. While I drink my flat white, Chloe makes a new friend in the sprawling outdoor playground.

After breakfast in our cabin, we set out to see what the surrounding region offers. Situated at the south-eastern corner of a national park, Umina Beach is isolated, in a funny way, and it’s a fair drive to our first destination in Terrigal. Rather than return to the highway, we opt for the scenic route along Empire Bay Drive, which offers a glimpse of local life. I particularly love the steep, narrow bridge to down St Huberts Island – it looks like it belongs in the Florida Keys. One of my favourite things to do as a kid on holidays in Port Stephens was visit the little shell museum in Corlette. The Central Coast Marine Discovery Centre in Terrigal takes me back to those days: it doesn’t have multi-million dollar interactive exhibits or a team of performing mascots, but it’s a highlight of our trip.

Upon entry, we encounter fish tanks that contain a Port Jackson shark, an octopus, and assorted marine species native to Central Coast waters, plus a man-made rock pool where we can touch sea slugs, periwinkles and anemones. Cody is fascinated with the shark jaws mounted on the wall. In the following days, we never stop hearing about “the treasure hunt”, where Chloe has to prowl the centre looking for laminated pictures and tick them off on a worksheet. Towards the back of the facility are tables where kids can colour-in a picture or paint a plaster and take it away as a memento. I spend as long as Cody will permit, studying a cross-section of Captain Cook’s Endeavour and wondering how so many men spent so long in such a confined space without throttling one another.

Cellar doors are popping up in the Central Coast with increasing frequency. One of the newest is Distillery Botanica. It occupies the grounds of the old Fragrant Garden, which has become quite dilapidated, and specialises in gin. Not far up the road is Fires Creek, which makes wines from unusual fruits. Even if you’re not willing to try the tipples, it’s worth a visit to walk around its grounds, which could have been lifted from an English country garden in springtime.

While Cody sleeps off the morning’s excitement in our cabin, Chloe and I walk up to The Barn to hire one of the tandem trikes we’ve seen zooming around. When I say ‘tandem’, I mean I’m the one pedalling and she’s giving directions. There’s no better way to get to know the park’s layout, and it’s good exercise while my office-pale skin is lapping up vitamin D from the afternoon sun. Chloe turns to me and smiles. “I’m having so much fun, Daddy!”

We return the trike and wander down to the jumping pillows, which Chloe has almost to herself. When Cody wakes, we go en famille to the heated pools at the western end of the park. The wind picks up, and that, along with our rumbling tummies, coaxes us out of the water to go in search of dinner.

The Alfresco Brasserie at Ettalong Bowling Club is the biggest surprise of our trip. Almost brand new, it has the feel of a restaurant in a high-end casino and an even better play area than the Ettalong Diggers. We barely see Chloe in the hour and a half we’re there; she’s off making new friends (again).

Our third day is a quiet one. In the afternoon, we get talking to the family in the cabin behind ours. One girl is Chloe’s age and they immediately bond, as four-year-olds do, and suddenly our cabins become communal. Before waterslides and jumping pillows, this was what holiday parks were about. All at once, I feel like a kid, too, making friends simply due to proximity. I have an early memory of my grandfather telling me about Eric Worrell’s Australian Reptile Park, which put Gosford, or more precisely, Wyoming, on the map back in the 1960s. It moved to its current location in Somersby in 1996 and that’s where we stop off on our way home. It has come a long way from its humble beginnings (see ‘The Ocean Beach connection’). The original spirit has not been lost, however, and there are free picnic areas, reptile and spider exhibits (where the creepy-crawlies are still milked to create antivenin) and these days it has a wide variety of cuddly native fauna as well. ‘Plod’ the Diplodocus was one of Australia’s first ‘big’ tourist attractions and he still attracts visitors from the highway, while inside he has some company nowadays, including a Pteranodon sitting on its nest. These statues are a big hit with Cody. As we continue on to Sydney, I reflect that everything we’ve done, every place we’ve visited, has been kid-friendly. That’s why parents, even those in denial like my wife and I, choose to holiday on the Central Coast. When you have kids, you can become a kid again, too.

The Sydney Bypass

Five generations of my family have lived in Sydney’s south-west, so holidays on the Central Coast never made much sense to us. My grandparents sometimes visited Woy Woy with their kids back in the 1960s, but usually they headed further north to ‘properly’ get away or, in their later years, preferred the gentle drive down to the solitude of the NSW south coast. Much the same happened during my childhood – it was Nelson Bay up north or Manyana down south.The reason, as much as anything, was the ordeal of driving across Sydney to reach the Pacific Highway (or, in later years, the M1), only to stay in a comparatively busy seaside town. For this story, my family and I used the M5, M7 and M2 and reached Pennant Hills Road in about 45 minutes. We then spent nearly as much time crawling along one of Sydney’s most congested roads while we gazed longingly at sections of the half-built NorthConnex, which will join the M2 and M1.

Central Coast holidays will be a far more enticing prospect when this is finished, even if the cost of tolls has to be factored in. NorthConnex is currently scheduled for completion by 2019.

The Ocean Beach Connection

The first iteration of Eric Worrell’s reptile park was the Ocean Beach Aquarium, which opened in 1948 and was located on the corner of Augusta and West streets, about 2km from the NRMA’s Ocean Beach Holiday Park. Although it’s now a Richardson & Wrench real estate agency, the original architecture has been retained, including the porthole windows that gave a view of the snakes and spiders inside to attract passers-by.

Local historian Julie Atchison used to live near the holiday park (or caravan park, as it was then), and she has fond memories of hearing holidaymakers walking up to the short-lived Umina Cinema (1954-1961) and walking back again later in the night. She’s writing a book, Umina and Ocean Beach – the Early History, expected to be available mid-2018. Julie is always on the hunt for more information and photos of the area. To get in touch with her, email [email protected].

Words: Kris Ashton Photos: Kris & Kellie Ashton

This article was originally published in the Open Road magazine.

Fast Facts

NRMA Ocean Beach Holiday Resort
Sydney Avenue, Umina Beach

Jasmine Greens Kiosk
Sydney Avenue, Umina Beach

Central Coast Marine Discovery Centre
11 Terrigal Drive, Terrigal

Distillery Botanica
25 Portsmouth Road, Erina

Fires Creek winery
192 Wattle Tree Road, Holgate

Ettalong Diggers
51-52 The Esplanade, Ettalong Beach

Ettalong Bowling Club
103 Springwood Street, Ettalong Beach

Australian Reptile Park
Pacific Highway, Somersby