We headed out at a respectable 8.30am with 540km to drive until Coober Pedy. Google suggests this is just over a 5 hour drive, but with lunch and rest stops required, we didn't arrive at our destination until 4pm.I'd expected us to reach desert straight away, but we passed two big lakes (Gairdner and Hart) and fairly lush scrubby vegetation up to Woomera. 6km off the highway, 2 hours north of Port Augusta, Woomera was a pleasant surprise. With connotations of ref...

It was super cold overnight in Tanunda - so much so that we had quite a lot of condensation on the inside of our camper and had a bit of drying off to do before we departed. The kids put this time to good use patting the local ponies and making new friends on the jumping pillow. Trusting our NAVMAN instructions, we took a very scenic route north with lunch and a wine buy up in Clare, passed through old copper mining towns such as Quorn with few people but lots o...

DAY 1 - Melbourne to Lake Fyans, Grampians - 375km And they're off! We got off to a leisurely start after lunch on Sunday April 20th - a day earlier than originally planned. We'd hoped to get to the Horseshoe Bend campsite in the Little Desert National Park (outside Dimboola) and stay for 2 nights to have a whole day in the area, but we had to stop a couple of times for various bits and pieces (flapping bag fly due to rivet popping off meant heaps of wind resista...

One more sleep! We're mostly packed and ready to go - just a few more bits and pieces to throw in the car tomorrow, tidy up the house, and off we go. This next part probably won't interest anyone bar those also into planning trips, but there has been an awful lot of organisation over the last few months. The Car: Land cruiser 100 series 2005 - have replaced the stereo with one that is ipod compatible and has Bluetooth; upgraded whole exhaust (apparently the fact...

Only four weeks to go until our big trip up north, so we decided to head down to the Mornington Peninsula for a couple of nights to work out the final details of what we're going to need to stay comfortable with every convenience, whilst getting used to have b***** all storage space. My mum's aunt had a holiday house at Blairgowrie and we used to stay at least once a year up until our early 20's. We used to walk through the campground at the bottom of Stringer Rd...