For breakfast and coffee in town, our pick is One Little Sister, a small local kitchen doing genuinely good brunch with produce from the Fleurieu. It is a five minute drive from the park and gets busy on weekends, so get there early.

For a sunset feed on the water, Aqua Blue Seafoods sits right on the Normanville foreshore and is the obvious choice when you want to eat fish and chips with your toes almost in the sand. For a proper pub feed, The Normanville Hotel on Main Road is a short drive, with the usual pub classics done well. If you are happy to drive 10 minutes inland, Forktree Brewing at Carrickalinga is worth booking ahead for, with wood-fired pizzas and cold beer looking out over paddocks to the sea.

At the park, the camp kitchen and BBQ areas cover the nights when nobody wants to drive anywhere, and the park sits about a 10 minute walk from the local shops for the basics.

The beach is the headline here. A short sandy track leads you straight out of the park and onto the soft-sand stretch that runs from Normanville Beach north to the jetty and south toward Carrickalinga. It is a safe, gently shelving swimming beach with almost no surf, which makes it one of the better family beaches on this stretch of coast. When the wind turns, the same beach fires up for kitesurfers, who are worth watching from the dunes.

Back in the park, the water park and games room keep the kids more than busy on off-beach days, and the communal fire pit is the spot for the late afternoon wind-down. For a walk, the BIG Gorge Walk at Second Valley is a 20 minute drive and takes you through sheer pink cliffs to a properly wild pebble beach. The HMAS Hobart Memorial Lookout just south of the park is worth the quick detour for the coastal views.

Further afield, you are well placed for a day trip into McLaren Vale for wineries (30 minutes) or down to Cape Jervis to catch the Kangaroo Island ferry (45 minutes). Dolphin sightings off the beach are common, and whale season runs through winter.

The park sits on a working holiday coast and can get very busy over South Australian school holidays and long weekends, so book the pet cabins and better powered sites well ahead. The beach access is via a short sandy track, not a paved path, so it is not the easiest for wheelchairs or prams.