Potential Darwin Trip

Another quick update, In the new year, April to be exact, i may have the opportunity to revisit Katherine. My parents are planning a road trip from Melbourne to Katherine and at this stage i am planning on traveling with them. Unfortunately due to timing and the impact some of these trips are having on the kids schooling, Sara and the girls wont be traveling with us.

What this means is that we will be traveling lighter than normal in that we will only have one car, a Holden Colorado and more than likely our Jayco Expanda. This will prove to be a very different experience to 2009 when we did this in the camper trailer. Mum and Dad did the last trip in their Toyota Kluger, sleeping in the back, so it should also be a more comfortable trip for them :)

Many of the planned stops will be familiar however we will be planning on doing some of the things we missed the first time around. We are also going to attempt some free stay stops to help reduce costs and experience something different.



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More to come on this however as always, if you have any suggestions, especially for free stay camp spots, please leave a comment.

Upcoming Trip to look forward to

Hi All,

Well, Christmas is nearly upon us and this year we have planned a Christmas Getaway. We are planning to spend a week in Canberra. As a family we are actually looking forward to this as the kids have never really been to Canberra beyond a simple stop over on our way to Sydney.

We are planning on visiting many of the major sites including the War Memorial, The Parliment House, both new and old, as well as the Mint. As we only have 5 days there this should be easy to fill up. During our stay in Canberra we are staying at the Canberra Motor Village so feedback to follow.


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If you have any suggestions on things to see and do, as always, please leave a comment.

Trip Planning

Hi Everyone,

It’s been a bit quiet on the Holiday front for us lately but we are planning a getaway over Christmas to Canberra so more to come.

 I read an article today I thought I would share regarding Trip Planning, and in particular, a web app called OnTheWay. OnTheWay is a website that links in with foursquare to help identify potential stops along your route. Stops such as fuel, accommodation and food are indicated, along with tips from foursquare when available. It’s very simple to use with you indicating a start and end location for your route and it then shows you the route in stages with a list of available stops in each stage you can select and add to an Itinerary.

Foursquare, for those of you that may not know, is a social tool that allows you to "check in" to various locations when you are out an about. You can then get access to reviews, or leave your own, on businesses and places for others to reference. Foursquare is available for all of the current Smartphone variants. Foursquare also allows you to follow friends and family and see where they have been in respect to locations they check in to.

As always, feel free to leave any comments on, or suggestions of other great planning tools. Also feel free to look me up on foursquare.

OnTheWay
http://www.onthewayapp.com/

Foursquare
https://foursquare.com/

Stevenson Falls–Otway Ranges

Hi All, Another update in quick succession to the last, and we are not even on holidays

 

We took the opportunity of Melbourne Cup day to take a drive in the Sara’s new truck. We need to have the kilometres up so we can tow the van in a couple of weeks, and we also needed to run the engine in a bit so i thought a nice drive along the Great Ocean Road would meet our needs. The engine would not sit at any single RMP level and the car would not get over 90KPH. All good.

Also, after watching a camping DVD over the weekend we saw a segment on Stevenson’s Falls which looked nice and would be on our route so off we went.

The drive to the falls turn off was uneventful. It was once we made the turn off that the fun began with a couple of kilometres of winding dirt road we took the car bush and its not even a week old. The road was actually in great condition and wound through some nice forest. I am glad we had the new car as i could never of taken the commodore down this road. At the end of the road we found the Stevenson falls camping area, which actually had quite a few family's making use of it for the long week end. It seemed a great spot if you have a tent or camper trailer. From here it was another short drive to the falls walking trail.

The walking trail is only 500m and is an easy walk. The surroundings are great and there was a lot of water coming over the falls which made for a very misty environment and a nice clean running river. I also managed to pick up a leech which was not discovered for about 30mins so it was well fed.

After the falls we drove to Kennet River for lunch before we took the winding great ocean road home via Lorne and Anglesea.

Our new tow vehicle–A 4WD Holden Colorado

Well, we finally done it. After many years of talking about it and making do with our various lease cars, we finally went out and purchased our own tow vehicle.

We can now begin the slow exercise of setting this car up for towing and the many trips we want to do in the future. As always, if you have any suggestions, please add them to the comments.

So far we have only added the Tinting, a Tow bar with our old electric break controller (Tekonsha Prodigy) and its booked in for a tub liner with ARB. We also plan to fit a UHF radio, an upgrade from our current hand held unit and i am looking at either the GME TX 3340 or the TX3540 with the decision mainly based on price. Without a Bulbar, or plans to get one in the near future, it looks like the antenna will be mounted off of the sports bars.

Some Iphone Travel apps worth looking into

I thought i might make a quick update to the blog as i have found another Iphone travel App worth looking at.

iOutback

Firstly there is the Tourism NT App, iOutback. This one has been around for quite a while and provides access to information on attractions and accommodation throughout their 6 key regions. Definitely worth a look if you are thinking of traveling up there.

Explore WA

The Second App is along the same lines, published by Tourism Western Australia, Explore WA. It provides a similar type of information and would of been of great benefit during our last trip. 

 

If you know of any other Apps, perhaps for the other states, please leave a comment as i would love to have a look at them.

ABC Nullarbor Audio Tour / Podcast

Well, our trip is just a memory now. We have been home for nearly 2 months and we are getting itchy feet already

I saw the following link today and thought i would share it. Its a podcast / audio tour presented by the ABC. It would of been great to listen to if i had known about it as we travelled over the Nullarbor ourselves. I hope the information come in time for you

http://www.abc.net.au/eyre/nullarbor/

If you know of any other productions like this for our many road trip possibilities i would love to hear about them.

Instagram Photos

Below is a series of photos i have taken using Instagram for the Iphone. These were all taken at many of the places we stopped, leave a comment if you would like to know where a particular one was taken as i tried to add these to the blog as i took them, as you may of seen at the start of the trip, but it seems to of broken my page layout so i deleted them and stopped updating.