The Israels Australian Adventure

Small amount of currancy bought today. Also set up a Revolut account for each of us to try and avoid the 3% surcharge on spending in other currencies. Karen has succumbed to mobile banking apps. She is raving about them and wished she had followed her mother, years ago. Also been looking at 2step verification needed to login to Google accounts etc. Wanted to avoid text to our UK numbers as our roaming charge will be £6 a day. Will post our Australian mobile numbers once we have the sims in our phones.

22nd August, 2023 We have still not finalised everything as far as timings are concerned.  We plan to start on Wed, 1st November and want to be in Adelaide for Nat & Maddie (hopefully Rob too) joining us at the start of the school holidays on 6th December.  So here is what we think at the moment.  We have a huge list of things to see and do in each area. Map 1 - The Gold Coast Because the Gold Coast is so close to Brisbane we decided not to spend too much time here as we have the whole of February to revisit areas we want to see in more depth.  We have allowed 6 days to get to Gosford which is approximately 1,000 Km. Map 2 - Sydney On our last trip we were lucky enough to spend a whole week just down by the bridge but we couldn't go to see the Blue Mountains because of terrible fires they were experiencing at the time.  So this time we are rectifying that.  5 days covering approx 500 Km.  This time we are planning on taking the tra...

Saturday, 6th May 2023 Our initial thoughts were to fly to Perth, buy a car and then drive to Nat & Rob's in Queensland.  However after doing extensive research we realised that we didn't really want to drive through central Australia.  It would take a long time, be very boring and potentially dangerous.  Not to mention the logistics of buying a vehicle in one state and registering it in another.  So we decided to fly to see Perth, Darwin, Alice Springs and the all essential Uluru.  David has always wanted to visit Uluru so for this trip it was a must.  The best time to visit Uluru is July-September.   Nat & Rob's daughter Georgia is visiting us in England in August/Sept so the earliest we could go was September. We therefore decided to fly straight to Brisbane so that we could drop off our large cases and give ourselves the working week to recover from the flight and buy a car (see following posts for these plans).   Sat, 16th S...

17 August 2023 The last three months have been taken up with planning the routes we wanted to take for our drive about.  We have decided to start with Queensland as Cairns gets very hot in Summer but if we go there first temperatures shouldn't get above 28°C, which is plenty hot enough for us!  Although we are booking nothing in advance to allow for flexibility,  however we have planned how long we want to stay in each area and made a list of the things we want to do.   First Stage Our plan is to start on 1st October.  We have allowed for 6 nights to get to Dixie.  KM =2,500.  Approximately 33 hours of driving.  We think this will be the most gruelling part of the journey in terms of driving as there isn't much to stop and see between stops. Second Stage The next 5 days we only cover approximately 500Km on our way to Cairns.  We then have a lovely 4 days break around Daintree Forest. Final Stage From Cairns we drive down t...