After spending the weekend with my parents, Linda and I left Brisbane on Monday morning to continue our northward migration along the Queensland coast. After taking the Gateway Bridge over the Brisbane River, we then took a quick detour over the Hornibrook Bridge to check out the Redcliffe Peninsula; before later turning off the Bruce Highway and onto the Steve Irwin Way to see the Glasshouse Mountains. So named because Captain Cook had been reminded of the glasshouse furnaces in his native Yorkshire when he first saw them, the Glasshouse Mountains are actually volcanic crags that have been left standing while the earth around them has eroded away over the past twenty million years or so. In any case they are a startling sight, rising straight up out of the otherwise relatively flat coastal plain to ... read more

The fourth week of our East Coast road-trip saw Linda and I heading north up the NSW Coast from Sydney, with our first stop being Caves Beach, just outside Swansea (a short distance from Newcastle). Thankfully the tide was out, so we were able to clamber about the rocks and explore the caves - some of which had passageways connecting them to each other - behind the southern end of the beach. From there we continued north to Newcastle, where we had just collected our take-away pizzas and headed to a nearby park as a threatening storm front blew in from the south, leaving us in perfect position from which to watch the deluge of rain and electrical storm as it beared down upon us... before we ultimately had to scamper back to the shelter of ... read more

As Linda and I left Victoria behind and entered New South Wales to begin our second week on the road (Monday 12thOctober), we unfortunately encountered our first really lousy weather day of the trip so far. With rain falling pretty much the whole day, we initially followed the highway from Mallacoota to Eden - where we stopped for lunch at a park overlooking Twofold Bay - before turning off onto the Sapphire Coast Drive for the remaining hundred kilometres or so to Narooma. Eventually we called it quits for the day after pulling into a free rest area just north of Narooma in Bodalla State Forest; and after slurping down a hearty vegetable soup cooked by Linda in the back of the van (so as to keep out of the rain), we turned in for the ... read more

There was only one problem with hiring a campervan and driving all the way from Broome to Perth... we had to drive all the way back again to return it, a trip of around 2500kms in all! Fortunately however, we had saved the best for last - for our return route along the Great Northern Highway would take us straight past Karijini National Park, the jewel in Western Australia's crown. First though we had to deal with the small matter of backtracking 600kms to South Hedland – where we spent the night (Monday 2nd June) at a nondescript caravan park just off the main road – before taking the inland highway a further three hours south the next day to the Karijini turnoff. It was along this stretch of road that we passed some of the ... read more

With our stay in Shark Bay having come to an end, Linda and I bid a fond farewell to Fowler's Camp and hit the road for the 400km-plus haul to Coral Bay (Thursday 22nd May), first back-tracking 100kms to the Coastal Highway, before proceeding north towards Carnarvon where we stopped for a lazy riverside lunch. After then turning off the Coastal Highway onto the Exmouth-Minilya Road, we couldn't help but marvel at the presence of countless huge termite mounds scattered across the landscape - some of which towered up to two metres high. While I had seen such structures before, they were obviously a new phenomenon for Linda - who found it hard to believe that these giant mounds of earth could have been built by such tiny little creatures! It was right around dusk when ... read more