The planning has been going for ages... the plotting of ideas, the discovery of road blocks. No. Really. ROAD BLOCKS! We have now worked out a 7 week plan to travel 10,700km/6700 miles across the southern plains (the Nullarbor) over to the wide-open, mysterious, isolated state of Western Australia. Did you know that W.A., as it is referred to here, is massive? And by massive I mean 2,525,500 sq km/975,101 sq miles... Alaska is only 1,717,854 sq km/663,268 sq mi... Now the population of W.A. is much greater than Alaska's but the population density is still less than 1 person per square kilometer... We have a lot of driving to do!
Here is a map of our planned route. Staying to the south all the way to the coast, up the coast as far as Exmouth and then down through the very dry desert.
View Larger Map
At the moment, this route is our plan. We have several points (especially to the south and west) where we have many Multi-night stays planned. The whole objective of this trip is to take our time, suss out an area and go with the flow. If we feel like staying on longer in any particular place, we will. If we get tired of camp life, then we'll book into a hotel for a few nights. This is it. This is our plan...
We have our tent and ordered self-inflating 4wd mattresses. For those back home, these are nice thick mattresses with 10cm foam core that do roll up to a tidy (heavy) bundle... wouldn't plan to hike with these bad boys, but since we are car-camping, we should be sweet! Today is laundry day where I will be madly washing every last thing in the house, moving out of the closet in our bedroom so that our house-sitter can use that space and not live out of suitcases for the next few months and packing. Packing like I've never packed before...I've started by placing strategic piles of things around the house as we think of things that need to come along. As I am sitting here typing away I keep thinking I need to flag things that are nice to have vs MUST have in case we start running out of room in the car we know the things we can cull...
We started justifying our plan a few weeks ago by planning out from Adelaide up through to Cervantes north of Perth. Then we worked backwards from our desired date of return from Melbourne up to Katherine. From Cervantes to Katherine is a 'short' 3600 km/2230 mi trip and on the calendar - we only had nine days. This didn't leave us any time to enjoy the Kimberly's, Monkey Mia, Broome, etc... so we had to re-plan with Option B which is why we are sticking to W.A. We will someday try to do a fly in fly out adventure in Broome to experience the Kimberleys and same with Darwin to see Kakadu and Katherine. Or, next time we take a mid-career break, we'll do the red centre via road-trip after learning from this trip!
Now off to get organised!! Jeepers, we have A LOT to do before we take off on Wednesday...
I hope to write pretty regularly on this trip... since we have a lot of downtime in the car! It's up to you to check back occasionally as I'm only sending this first note out with the link... Wish us luck!
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