Merimbula, NSW: Is this the most underestimated seaside getaway in NSW?

Is Merimbula the most underestimated seaside getaway in NSW? Could be. The setting is beyond lovely. Lagoons, lakes and waterways blue as peacock feathers are embraced in bushland that rises up hillsides and spritzes the breeze with the scent of eucalyptus. A string of voluptuous beaches allows you to pick from a daily menu of desires: snorkelling off Bar Beach, surfing at Short Point, picking your spot to flop on six-kilometre Main Beach.

And yet Merimbula, 70 kilometres shy of the Victorian border, is far enough from Sydney (six hours) and Melbourne (seven) that it has avoided short-break busyness, unnecessary entertainments and big-city pretensions. Merimbula has Goldilocks size and a laidback country attitude. If you're on a road trip, you think you might spend a night, then get lulled into disgraceful indolence and slink off a week later wondering where time has gone.

The charm is old-fashioned and makes you think of childhood holidays: Boney M on the radio, buckets and spades, Norfolk pines tall as skyscrapers, boiled lollies to break your jaw, salty skin. In a fraught travel era that follows almost two years of end-of-days worries, that retro feeling is very welcome. This is a stress-busting getaway on which to slump over long lunches, paddle at the water's edge, poke at starfish in rock pools, and pop a cork as another sunset splashes the water pink before it goes slouching over the hill in Technicoloured glory.

You can also feel fine by working on your fitness in happy ways that don't involve sweat-smelling gyms and dreary exercise machines. There's swimming, of course. Windsurfing. Hiking the headlands of Bournda or Mimosa national parks. The recently inaugurated Wharf to Wharf walk will take you 27 kilometres north to Tathra if you're up for it.

Head down to Mitchies Jetty and hire a kayak. This is where Merimbula Lake opens to the ocean in a swirl of blue patrolled by pelicans. You skim past a man in a boat, then past a jetty where a fisherman scrapes fish so that his sun-toughened skin twinkles with slivery scales like Mardi Gras glitter. Merimbula is the sum of these happy little moments, on sunny days to the background boom of the surf.

If there's one thing we've learned in recent times, it's to make the most of slow pleasures.

Remember the old days when life wasn't a rush and there was no need to fidget with a phone for fear of missing out? If you've forgotten that in these sped-up times, Merimbula reminds you that, once upon a time, we all got along perfectly well doing the simplest of things.

Watch whales hurrumphing in the ocean. Admire the red rocks poured like cooking dough over the coast at Merimbula Wharf, startling in their burgundy brightness against a sapphire sea. Sit under a jacaranda tree and have a beer. Take a drive without checking where you're going, and see where it takes you. A half-hour inland and you'll be amid the cow-chewed fields of Bega. A half-hour south and you can paddle up the twisting Towamba River in a kayak, serenaded by birdsong.