Summary of our Trip Around Australia (almost) - Part 1
December 16th, 2007 | by lissie |OK The TV is starting into the the summer season of repeats so I thought that I would re-cycle some electrons and do a series of digest posts of our trip around Australia so far. This blog really started to keep a record of the trip to replace the normal diary and collection of 100’s of photo prints that need to be cataloged and stored after every other long trip I’ve done. So at least it all fits on the laptop now! The photo album is here if you are interested.
I assumed that we’d have better access to the internet than we did. In reality having the laptop was great because we could keep a diary and download photos as we went, even when there was no internet access to be had for 100’s of kilometers
One of the things I was determined not to do in the blog was to fall into the really, really detailed diary entry “well having had a big night out with the Swiss girls we met at the Chinese we didn’t wake up until 9am, we went down the road to the little German cafe to have their excellent muesli and goats milk with a local pineapple milkshake” if you see what I mean! It gives travel blogs a bad name!
One of the disadvantages of blogging as it all happens is that you do not have any perspective on events at the time so doing this digest at least allows me to fit in all into perspective.
Part 1 Preparation and Timing
The timing of the trip was basically dictated by when we knew we would have able to rent our home out most easily, which in New Zealand is early in the New Year, which fitted with having Christmas at home too.
In the end we left in early March in a hurry on to get to Tasmania before it got too cold, we probably would have been better off leaving a month or so earlier because the weather was bad in Tasmania by early May.
Brisbane as a starting point was chosen because
- relatives whose address we could use for registering the vehicle, bank accounts and insurance papers
- Cars registered in Queensland don’t need an annual mechanical check like the ones in NSW need.
- Queensland is the second largest state in land area so we thought we had a better chance of returning to it when the time came to sell too.
It didn’t take us too long to get set up : we arrived on a Wednesday, found a 4WD on the Friday and picked it up the following Thursday after arranging the initial inspection and repairs. We then took another week to practice camping in Maroochydore on the Sunshine Coast. We knew the area so we figured it had the right combination of pleasant caravan park and good local malls to buy all the bits and pieces in.
