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Our family, like many others- loves to travel. This is our blog on our adventures and dreams.

In this blog are a few tips I have discovered over the years about travelling overseas and more recent,

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Sunday, February 12, 2012

Semaphore Caravan Park

We opted for a sea change over the festive season, so we decided on one of my favourite Adelaide beaches- Semaphore.

 Our Christmas decorations

We stayed at the Discovery Holiday Parks Adelaide Beachfront in Semaphore. Its a medium sized park really well located on the beach, and around a 20 minute walk from the main street in Semaphore.

 Main street with LOADS of places to shop and eat

 On the most part, its a great park. Fantastic location, good ammenities like the camp kitchen and 2 pools if you don't fancy a sea swim.



Unfortunately there is a "however".  We found the bathrooms were not cleaned everyday, and I'm not sure whether it was because of the holiday season and didn't have staff or if they forgot. I actually put a square of loo paper marked with lippy on one of the toilet floors. It was still there 2 days later. The showers have a communal drain (ew!) and also have shower curtains (something of which I'm not big on).

We also found the park quite badly managed. At Hackney Caravan park we found the staff were always around and more than willing to help, AND knew what they were talking about. The staff at Semaphore (apart from the grounds keepers) were never seen and the office staff were very unhelpful.

When we initially booked our site we told the office staff we had a 6m Toyota Coaster bus with an annex.  They assumed we had a bus the size of a coach and put us on a huge site, which was OK but a little unnecessary.

We then looked at extending our stay for another week, but were told repeatedly that the park was booked out and we had to go. On the morning of check out David asked once again- telling staff AGAIN that we only had a small bus and could quite easily fit on a caravan site. The woman at the counter was adamant they were booked out (even had a sign on the pin board outside saying NO VACANCY). David asked once more, and hey BINGO they had a space (actually they had loads of spaces we noticed) in another spot, so we had to move.

We booked our time and were fine until the day before we had to checkout to leave. David was at work and around 11am I had a knock on our bus. It was one of the ladies from the office who quite rudely said "we had missed checkout and we had to leave now." I said, "no we are booked in until tomorrow". She replied with, "well no I have someone else booked in here so you have to leave". As I looked around at all the empty spots thinking.... well why cant you move them to another spot? I told her I would call hubby and he will call the office to sort it as he had made the booking.

It turned out that we had paid for another night but someone put in the wrong checkout date and no-one else checked in that day either might I add.

In all honesty if I was the park owner, I would not be impressed that I was loosing out on money over a peak season because of staff errors and ignorance.

They also have concrete slabs for the caravan sites which makes it hard to peg down an annex if you have one. We reccomend parking your van or bus on the concrete and have your annex on the grassed bit.

Anyway, apart from that we loved Semaphore. During the summer months they have a carnival down the beachfront with lots of rides, beach fun and the steam train that can take you from the jetty to the caravan park.









We also highly recommend the Semaphore lifesaving club for a meal on Friday nights with a view on the deck to die for!

All in all, if it wasn't for the beach and the gorgeous main street and the surf lifesaving club we probably wouldn't have stayed at the park.

We give Adelaide Beachfront Caravan park 2 Fowls out of 5

2 comments:

  1. Hey!
    While you were spending Christmas in Semaphore we were in Parham.
    Now this is a spot I would give negative fowls to! So awful that we had to leave, and we stayed two hours further north in what we thought was a beautiful little town.... Snowtown! Maybe we will see you on our way back? You never know! Happy travels x

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  2. Hey girl! How did you guys go? Did you go through Norseman at all? Now thats a scary town LOL

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