Reflecting back in Noosa

We are back home in Noosa. It’s been lovely sunny day today with a drive through some lovely scenery that was split into 3 parts.
The first part was from Quinalow to Black Butt because the bakery there has the best pies we have ever tasted. It is a regular stopover for us whenever we are in this area. So it was a delicious mushroom steak pie and coffee for breakfast while we looked over some of the street art murals on the walls.
The second part was from Black Butt to Kilcoy through some fantastic scenery because there is a caravan washing station there. Our caravan was carrying the dirty evidence of 5 weeks of long distance driving often on gravel roads and it badly needed a good wash. So the washing station at Kilcoy has high steps to gain access to wash the roof and can fit a caravan. It took about an hour but when the caravan came out it looked like a new one.
The third part was from Kilcoy to home in Noosa where on arrival we put the caravan on the front lawn of the house while we unpacked both the car and the caravan which took about 2 hours. Then it was time to take the car to the local car wash as it was really dirty and it too came out looking like new.
Our holiday trip seemed to go too quickly. It was busy yet very relaxing and we did a lot and saw a lot, and thankfully everything went according to plan without any major problems. We drove more than 8,700km over the 4 weeks. We averaged 20.2 litre per 100km, which is in line with our expectations and is a good figure for long distance towing of a large rig including some headwinds along the way. Fuel prices varied between $1.70 up to $2.02 per litre and averaged $1.80 which was lower than we had expected. Our long range fuel tank allowed us to top up when the price was low and to bypass the places with higher prices.
The caravan performed very well and was very comfortable and easy to live in despite some cold temperatures and some periods of rain. The van continues to meet and even exceed our expectations and we are very happy to have chosen the 20.6 Zone RV Base Off-Road.
Unfortunately we had a time constraint on this trip and had to be back home by today, but if we had more time there would have been a few places we would have stayed longer, for example the Barossa Valley and Broken Hill. We saw a lot of country and outback that gave us a taste of areas of Australia that Carolina had not seen before. We will go back to some of these places another time for a longer look.
Would we do anything differently? There are always ways of improving a trip. The campsite we had at Barossa Valley was not as good as many of the others we used during the trip and if we went back there we would choose a better one. However the free camps we stayed at turned out to be generally very nice in a variety of locations. We had put a lot of prep time into selecting these camps using WikiCamps as our primary reference and using their Trip Planner to put it all together. The time spent on finding good free camps was invaluable and made the trip so much more enjoyable. The number of excellent free camps available throughout Australia is simply staggering.
For most of this trip we travelled by ourselves which was fine because it allowed us to spend good quality time together. However our time with Mark & Sue was very pleasant and for future long trips we may put more focus on travelling together with some of our other caravanning friends. This would provide a nice social aspect to our travels while at the same time allowing us at times to venture into some of the more remote places of Australia where travelling as a group provides more safety and security as well as more fun.
Thankfully this trip has been very enjoyable and has whet our appetite for more caravan trips in the future. In the meantime we will take the caravan back to our Doonan storage in the next day or so as we won’t have the opportunity to use it again until September.Baca selengkapnya