Overland Australia

First up apologies for the lack of updates on the blog we have been busy building our new canopy setup over the past few months and have finally got it to the stage where I am happy with it and more importantly we can camp from it. For those of you that are interested I’ll post up some details of the new setup in our Setup page of the blog. On Thursday afternoon we patiently waited for high tide to come and go and set off to the Ocean Beach Camping area on Bribie Island just after lunch time. The beach on Bribie is our traditional Easter get away and it was great to return to the island after missing out last year. We were a bit tardy with our booking this year and missed out on our regular favourite sites but no longer having a camper trailer was a benefit as we can now look at using some of the smaller sites. This year we secured sites 12 and 13 and were joined by Anna’s Mum and Dad – Greg and Lenore on Friday afternoon and they stayed with us through to Sunday afternoon. O...

Happy New Year I hope you all had a great Christmas break and a safe enjoyable New Year. Its been a busy couple of months settling back into normal life, going back to school/work, selling the camper and then the crazy Christmas season. Lots of changes ahead of us for 2017, with no camper we have started planning our canopy build on the Triton and have decided to have it made by MK Metal in Brendale. Hopefully it will ready in a few months in time for our Easter trip to Bribie Island. I'll post up some details of the build and how it progresses over the next few months. Anyway I've started to edit all of our video footage and this morning I've uploaded the first video that covers the first week or so of our trip out to Birdsville. For those of you that are interested I'll include a link to our YouTube channel in this post and there is a link at the top of the page too. I'll be posting up more videos as I get a chance to edit/create them, so keep an eye on our ch...

The girls woke us up early today as they were very excited to be going home and to see their Grandma and Granddad. Unfortunately it was raining pretty steadily this morning, as we didn't have far to go and Anna and I weren't in any hurry we decided to try and wait the rain out. After a few hours huddled under the small rear awning (the big awning wasn't setup) we had enough and the rain wasn't looking like it was going to stop anytime soon. We quickly packed up and were soon on the road home and we arrived at Greg and Lenore's house just before lunch, after lots of hugs and a quick chat we had to get back to work and setup the camper to dry it out and pulled all of our gear out of it so we could give it a good clean. The car and the camper are absolutely filthy and I am going to be kept busy over the next few days scrubbing everything to get rid of the mud, dust and dirt. We have made the difficult decision to sell our awesome camper as our future touring trips ...

Today was a day of chilling out and doing bugger all, we spent a couple of hours hanging out with the kids and discussing our trip and their favourite parts.  I can't believe its almost over with less than 200kms to travel to home and we are all experiencing mixed emotions. We are looking forward to returning home to see family and friends but we are going to really miss this travelling lifestyle that we have thoroughly enjoyed over the past 5 months. Late this afternoon we settled in around the fire and had our final happy hour together. Distance Traveled = 0 km Total distance traveled with camper = 39,324  km   Total number of nights in the camper = 291

We are only a couple of hours drive from home but we aren't really ready to go home yet… Anna and I agreed that we would be home by Friday the 16th as this is the last day of school for term 3 and we want to re-enroll the kids so they can return to school at the start of term 4. So we had a couple of days to burn and after consulting the maps and deciding the back roads would be better than travelling on the main highways we decided to make our way to one of our favourite campsites - Peach Trees in the Jimna State forest. This is the first time in 5 months that we will camp somewhere familiar, all of our other camps have been in areas we hadn't been to before. To get to Jimna we drove through Wondai and Murgon and took the Kilcoy - Murgon road which is a spectacular drive through farmland and state forests. When we arrived we noticed that the recent upgrades had been finished and the only thing left to do is to clean out and rebuild the swimming area which is set to happen ...

This morning we packed up and were on the road just before 10am, we stopped at a roadside rest area just outside of Injune for morning tea and then continued south to Roma. We had lunch at the bakery in Roma and grabbed a few supplies and diesel before continuing onto Chinchilla. We had an uneventful run  even though the roads here are much busier than what we are used to. I had found a free camp on Wiki camps near Chinchilla called Round Waterhole which seemed OK and we made our way there and was able to get a spot even though it was late in the day. Round Waterhole has no facilities and is pleasant enough, I'd say that the waterhole would dry up fairly quickly as it was fairly low even though there has been recent rain. Distance Traveled = 413 km Total distance traveled with camper = 39,078 km   Total number of nights in the camper = 289

This morning we packed our hiking back packs with our food for the day and filled our water bladders up and set off from camp just after breakfast. The weather this morning was much better and the cloud was quickly burning off to reveal a nice day for walking. Today we walked the main Carnarvon Gorge up to the Art Gallery which is a very large aboriginal stencil and engraving site, there is lots of information here which was great to help explain it all to the kids. I thought it was best to leave it to Anna to explain to the girls what the Vulva engravings of fertility meant... We left the Art Gallery and returned back down the main gorge track and found a nice little spot on the creek to have our lunch. From here we made it to the Amphitheater which was sensational and the girls entertained the other walkers by singing, the acoustics were great and I was very proud of them for having the courage to sing in front of a crowd. We back tracked along the main track until we got to the ...