Yesterday marked the 100th day since I hit the road, and I realised just how much more there was to see in this huge country. I bought a map of Australia, and I highlighted all the roads I’ve travelled on this trip so far. Southern and western parts of New South Wales, and eastern Victoria, are well covered in red highlighter, with roads big and small criss-crossing the region all marked ….but it’s taken me 100 days to do that and there is an awful lot left !
According to my spreadsheet I have travelled just over 15000 kms, which is nearly as much as some people do in a rushed trip around Australia yet I’ve only seen the bottom right quarter ! Mind you, I’ve met grey nomads who have been on the road for years and still have not seen it all. I am not a fast traveller, if I find a nice spot I like to stop there a while, then move on a couple of days later, and that might only be a couple of hundred kilometres down the road. I’m not on a short annual holiday, so I don’t have to rush along doing 1000kms in a day.
Fuel is still my biggest cost, at around 36%, with food (21%) and repairs/replacements (19%) the next biggest cost. The repairs bill being mainly due to 2 tyres that I had to replace, but I knew that would happen as they were rather worn at the start. Hopefully there will not be any more major repair bills ! The cost/day has increased, up to $70/day, mainly because of those tyres.
I was not originally planning on this, but I will be making a trip to Thailand in a couple of weeks. As a member of Thai Airway’s frequent flyer club I get several emails with special fares and holidays which I usually just delete because I could never take time off work to use them. Nowadays I don’t have that problem 🙂 This year the school holidays here do not coincide with Easter, so there must have been quite a few seats unsold for the period inbetween as there were cheap fares to Thailand available. Songkran, or the traditional Thai New Year, falls in this period, and I’ve always wanted to see it. Over the years it has turned from the traditional gentle washing of people’s hands into the world’s biggest water fight, just search Youtube for examples ! So I’ve bought a ticket to Thailand for 9 April, coming back 3 weeks later.
After that it will be time to start heading west, over to W.A. Something else I’ve also always wanted to do was snorkel with the whale sharks in north west WA, at Exmouth, so that will be the next “must do” on my bucket list. And the next after that will be to drive the Gibb River Road across the Kimberley. So that should be 3 big ticks on my bucket list !

Anyway, Happy Easter, and don’t eat too much chocolate ! 🙂