Housekeeping and Blog updates

We are now underway with the planning of the next trip. To help support the planning, i have set up an Itinerary page, as per some of the other trips we have made. It can be found here.

I also plan to update the other Itinerary pages linking to each blog post relevant to that particular trip. I should have this done over the next few days.

We are having quite a bit of fun planing this trip, especially since we now have our own 4WD. We are planing to go on a "tag along tour" whilst in Queensland, hopefully on Stradbroke Island, to learn how to drive on sand. Caitlyn is looking forward to hand feeding the Dolphins at Tin Can Bay, and of course, Sara and I cant wait to visit the Bundaberg Rum Distillery.

In Oberon we are planing to visit the Glow worms at Lithgow, the Jenolan caves and Katoomba. I cant wait to get the girls on the Scenic Railway.

As always, if you have any suggestions or comments please feel free to leave a comment here :)

Planning–Xmas 2012

Well, planning is now underway for Christmas this year. We would like to travel up to Queensland for the break and have picked Tin Can bay as our most northerly destination. We are still finalising our stops and are having some difficulties as many of the places we have chosen further south are either booked already, or are charging overly exorbitant prices for a powered caravan site.

The stops include Tin Can Bay, Surfers Paradise, Yamba and Oberon with other places in between.


View Larger Map

 If you have any great suggestions feel free to leave a comment.

Colorado updates :)

I have just added a page to the side bar showing the upgrades we are making to our tow vehicle as we make them, the page will also detail any issues we have.

Fuel economy information can be found here and is regularly updated.

Day Trip - Erskine Falls

Not a trip as such but as winter approaches we have decided to try and get out more on day/weekend trips rather than our normal weeks long trips.

Today we packed up the Colorado and headed on down to Lorne and the Erskine Falls. We picked a great day for it with the sun shining most of the day and the weather being mostly warm.

 

We headed out from Melbourne to Lorne first, via the start of the Great Ocean Road, stopping on the beach. As soon as we approached the water line, looking for shells, we started noticing common sea glass, ie beer bottles :). I mentioned to the kids to start looking for Blue sea glass to see how they might go and after some searching they found some. We also found clear, green and some ceramics. We didn't collect much in the way of quantity but we all had fun looking.

After this we made our way into Lorne and onto the road heading up into the Otways to Erskine Falls. A quick stop at the Blanket Leaf picnic area showed us where we would be returning for lunch, but first the falls.

 

I selected this destination as it was identified as being close to the carpark. I really did not waht to be walking through the hills for an hour looking for the waterfall. The falls in this case were, with the upper falls lookout being only meters from the carpark. The lower falls viewing platform, however, was quite a descent down many stairs. The stairs were well maintained and there were rails all the way to the bottom. The lookout, and the falls were magnificent and we spent quite a bit of time down here taking photos and looking around. I think we were also delaying the ascent back up the stairs :)

 

 

 

The climb back up only served to highlight how unfit we all are :(

 

After the falls we returned to the picnic grounds where we had a BBQ lunch, with Bianca manning the tongs. The park was nice and quiet, and i could see it being very popular in the summer.

 

After the falls and lunch, we returned to Lorne, where we took a walk down the main street and the foreshore, which was packed with people having the same idea, making the most of a great day.

 

Overall the kids loved the day out and we will be planning many more daytrips in the near future.

Darwin 2012–Alice Springs to Home

Well, Unfortunately the trip had to come to an end. On the way up i took heaps of photos and tried for a blog post per day. As what seems my normal trend on the way home, considering we are again traveling the reverse route, i have not taken as many photos, or updated the blog as much.

G’Day Mate turned out to be a great, quiet park with clean amenities. We stayed here 2 nights and really enjoyed the break from driving. We gave it a rating of 4/5.

Leaving Alice springs was nothing like when we arrived. On the way up to Darwin it was around 38/39 deg but as we left to go south it was only 17deg and raining. The rain was to stay with us for most of our drive south to Melbourne, and rather than the highs of 41deg on our northward journey we did not see the temperature rise above 21 deg on our journey south.

We ended up heading straight home rather than venture out to new areas, however we tried to target new parks. We stayed at Cadney Park station again, and surprisingly considering the Nomad traffic heading north, we were only one of 3 vans at the park that night. The flys were still there but not in their previous numbers. One highlight of this trip was having to pull right off the Sturt Highway to make way for some wide loads, 8.5m of houses. We encountered 4 of them heading into Port Augusta. We also managed to obtain the Colorado’s first stone chip in nearly 20,000km of trips.

On the second night we stayed at Port Germein. This is where we had lunch on our second day north. Unfortunately the rain set in and it blew a gale all night. That said the park was great, nice and clean and close to a nice little pub where we enjoyed a great, recommended, meal. I was planning to do a bit of fishing but the weather was bad. It was raining, very windy and the water was very choppy. I believe the jetty would not of been a very nice place to be.

From Port Germein we headed through Adelaide and on to the Bordertown caravan Park where we made our last stop. This campsite proved to be the nosiest for the trip as it was situated right on the main road. Other than  the noise the park was good with very clean amenities.

From there it was a short trip home. The Colorado performed flawlessly throughout the trip, however we took a big fuel economy hit on the last couple of days due to heavy head winds. The final figures from the Gas Cubby app are below.

 

Thank you for following the latest of our Caravan Holidays.

Darwin 2012–Katherine to Alice Springs

This update encompasses 2 days of travel, Katherine to Three Ways station and then Three Ways to Alice Springs. We are on our homeward stretches now.

Before we get into the trip, here are some animals i photographed at Rachel's before we headed off.

We left Katherine a bit later than we normally would as we saw the kids off to their school busses first, then off we went. The trip was mostly uneventful with the only really interesting part where we needed to stop due to a truck accident. From the chatter over the radio it seems the driver was OK, a few cuts and bruises. The truck, a tanker road train, “chucked a wobbly” and from that it seems the last trailer out of how many we are not sure, but normally four, started to wobble all over the road. i suspect it then unhitched and went over the embankment. We got there at the end of the recovery operation.

After that excitement we pulled into Three Ways happy to get out of the caravan. Unfortunately the park did not live up to expectations. We stopped here as we wanted to avoid Tennant Creek, somewhere we had heard nothing good about, but the park turned out to be the worst of the whole trip. The water out of all the taps, including the showers, was brown, smelled and we paid more for a night here than in Alice Springs. We would not recommend staying here to anyone.

I did, however, get an opportunity in the evening for some Astrophotography. I am in the process of stacking and post processing the images but below is some single frames that have turned out OK. With the moon now almost gone the sky looks great.

 

We awoke early the next day to find the starts still out, however after a brown water shower, the sun was rising and we were on the road again.

We had a few stops however the highlight, as always, was the Devils Marbles. We stopped here again for photos and during one of my climbing missions i grazed my leg, taking a sizable bit of meat away. Not Happy.

The camp ground at the rear of the marbles looked good and had a number of campers just puling out for the day. We also stopped at the Ti Tree roadhouse for lunch, where we caught up with the trailer from yesterdays accident.

For our stay in Alice Springs the time we have stopped at the G’Day Mate caravan park, on recommendation. So far it is a nice clean park with great amenities. For the first time we even had the park owners park the van on our site for us