Australia, The Great Adventure

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The Discover Downunder site has released a fantastic collection of PDF maps of “Great Drives” in Australia. Each one has a detailed map, road conditions, and then you read on while it talks you through the drive.

Just added to their already great collection of 20 or so drives around the Blue Mountains, 3 new drives in NT are now available.

Click here to check out all of the Great Drives

We went to the Caulfield Caravanning and Camping Show when it was on last month. The plan was to check out all of the touring tents in one place - possibly even to pick up a show special.

OK, apparently the Sandown show has lots of tents, but not so the Caulfield one! There was only one brand - Southern Cross, and while they did have a show special running, it was still way more than our budget would allow. (Oh, and also the OzTents, but they are too small for us, and out of our budget, and I’ve also heard that they are not good in a strong wind.)

Man, you’d think we’d have figured it out by now!

We were chatting to the sales rep at Freedom Camping, who of course was one-eyed biased towards their tents, and gave us lots of horror stories of people who had headed off around Australia with a cabin tent (like we have just bought), only to have it collapse half way up the East coast, and then they got a Freedom Touring tent and lived happily ever after! But the Freedom touring tents cost anywhere between $1,800 and $2,600!

Something I’ve been meaning to do for ages…

Just how far are we going? And how long is it likely to take?

So I sat there with Google maps up, and plugged in destinations and took note of distances and travel times.

Here is what I ended up with:

(click to enlarge)

Now here’s for some fun…

320 hours: If we want to travel easy and just average 2 hours per trip, and only move once a week, then this should take us about 3 years!

Be careful what you say. Sometimes your words will come back to haunt you!

As you would know, if you have been following our progress, we were looking at getting a camper trailer to head off on our Australian Great Adventure.

I have been living under a misconception for the last year and a half.

When I bought our current car - a Hyundai Sonata - new, I was told that Hyundai offers “Premium Assist”, which, I was told, is the equivalent of RACV’s roadside assist. So, and I confirmed this with the sales rep, I didn’t need to retain my RACV roadside assistance. So I duly cancelled it.

I have now just found out after calling Hyundai’s head office in Sydney, that the Roadside Assist does not apply to my Sonata. The only assistance offered is if it breaks down due to a manufacturer’s fault, they will tow it to a service centre.

Given that we are now looking at camper trailers (you know, the trailers that fold out into a tent, with the main bed already made up on the trailer), we need to define what we are looking for, so we know what is required and what is not.

What we would like is to find someone who has had enough of camping, and are selling off the lot - the camper trailer and all of the gear. They need to be local (Melbourne - preferably out the Northern / Western side). And it needs to come in at (well) less than $3,000.

Home educating our kids gives us a great excuse to purchase memberships to things such as the zoo and the museum. However each membership is yearly, and is generally not an insiginificant amount of money, and with us planning on travelling around Australia, we had to look at each one to see if it is worth renewing for the year. Most memberships offer reciprocal entry with other similar places, so this post explores just what is on offer.

Friends of the Zoo
Our zoo membership gives us free entry into Melbourne Zoo, Healesville Sanctuary and Werribee Open Range Zoo. It costs us $185 per year for a family membership. Reciprocal entry available at:

We are currently in a rental house. Therefore when we leave, we will no longer have a residential address. I guess that means that we will officially be of “no fixed address”!

We have a post office box (through my company), and we can get this mail forwarded to another address (ie. a relative’s address). Then we could get the mail forwarded to a post office near where we are going to be.

I am contacting the various different organisations that we deal with, that may need to know our physical address, to find out how they would like to deal with this.

One of the big concerns in my mind is - how are we going to fit everything we need into the car / trailer / whatever we end up travelling in? Even if we just go for an overnighter the car is packed to the gills - boot full, kids in the back seat with their legs sticking straight out because all of the foot space is full up, passenger in the front with their legs all twisted sideways to fit in between the bags there…

So it was with more than a little interest and a slight glimmer of hope that I stumbled across Doug Dyment’s site OneBag.com. As he says,