Omeo - Swifts Creek

The drive to Swifts Creek and Omeo is STUNNING!!!! It truly deserves the capitals. You drive along the curve of the Tambo River for much of the way and it is beautiful. The Tambo River isn't very deep, or isn't where we drove, but it is so picturesque. I would have loved to stop and take photos but there just weren't any safe places to stop and get the car and van off the road. Around every bend I was saying “ooh, look at that” and “oh isn't that beautiful!”

Omeo is a beautiful little town! It truly is lovely. We only stayed 2 days as the price at the caravan park was ridiculous (we payed less than half price at Swifts Creek which is half an hour down the road!). We thoroughly enjoyed the town as all of the trees were beginning to change colour and it is just a small, quaint little town that was nice to spend time in. We found a very cool cuckoo clock shop – completely unexpected – but definitely worth a visit. The lady who ran it was in her 80's. She used to also run the information centre so she was a wealth of knowledge of the area too.

The Omeo Caravan Park is truly beautiful (but way over priced)

We drove up to Mt Hotham, touring Dinner Plain (yes, it really is a place) on the way. I really liked the first 5 or so minutes at Dinner Plain as all of the houses are very different and unique to the typical Australian house, but after a little drive they all had a certain sameness to them. Very little was open seeing it is off season but I am glad we had a look (and I got some ideas of how I'd like my house to look if we ever built again). It was good to see Mt Hotham and to imagine it covered in snow in winter but to be honest, I enjoyed my walks at Charlotte Pass a lot more as I love the more alpine trees and snow grass environment. Mt Hotham was much more rugged and less vegetated.

The houses of Dinner Plain 

 View from Mt Hotham

Hiking along Razorneck Ridge

After 2 days at Omeo we drove back to Swifts Creek. This has a great little camp ground just across the Tambo River from the town and one of the nicest bakeries I have come across. The bakery was interesting as they didn't have lots of food options but the bread was delicious and they had a constantly changing array of tasty treats. My guess is they baked a batch of a couple of different treats – like cherry ripe slice, donuts, vanilla slice etc – then the next day they would bake some different goodies – like cupcakes, wagon wheels and other yummy things. So you never knew what goody you would find when you went to buy "just a loaf of bread". We spent quite a bit of money at the bakery but hey, it's good to support the local towns, especially when the camping and the bakery prices were so reasonable :)

We spent the week at Swifts Creek where Michael, Melissa, Willow and Sakari joined us. We all had a great time together. The kids spent hours each day playing in the creek and making up all sorts of games.

One of the best parts of our stay here was Greg went gold panning one day.... and found gold.... and the gold bug was caught.!!! So the next day we all headed out to explore and gold pan Swifts Creek. More gold was found. Hours were spent playing, I mean panning, in the dirt for gold..... fun for all of the kids (big and little alike), although the little one's lost interest much quicker than Greg did :) We certainly wouldn't make our fortune... more like 50 cents maybe.... but still, we found gold!

We also managed to fit us all in our caravan for a roast lamb dinner one night.... we were very impressed to get 8 people in round the table of such a small space, although as caravans go ours isn't small. And we had a very yummy roast lamb dinner.

The other good part of Swifts Creek.......Any guesses? Hot showers with great water pressure! My “must haves” in life have been reduced to being warm (after freezing at Jindabyne) and a hot shower with good water pressure.