Over the 2019 April school holidays, we were supposed to be doing a 3-week trip to Uluru with Dale’s family. Dale had spent the previous 6 months staring at maps planning the whole trip and the various routes we would take. Of course, he was looking for the roads less travelled, which meant we would cover about 6000kms over that time. As we prepared for the trip with excitement and anticipation, we kept a constant eye on the weather so that we would be prepared. We had spent a bit of money getting the car ready with new tyres, a tyre repair kit, and a Stone Stomper for the van, among other things.
Unfortunately, the weather up north was not looking great. There were a few cyclones coming across bringing huge amounts of rain. To cut a long story short, every single road that we wanted to travel on ended up completely flooded! We looked at doing our trip in reverse, but even the roads down south were completely cut off, and we would have no way of getting home, unless we threw in a big detour on bitumen roads. The whole point of the trip wasn’t just to get to Uluru, but to enjoy the adventure along the way.
The weekend before we were due to leave, we had to make an executive decision to cancel our Uluru trip. This meant that Dale’s parents had to cancel and change flights from Sydney, and his brother who was driving up from Casino needed to amend his plans. Dale was absolutely gutted!! We began looking at maps again to find a new trip that would cover new territory for us. We had already done a lot of the east coast south of Mackay, so we decided to venture north through Cairns and beyond to Cape Tribulation. Ideally, we would have loved to get all the way to Cape York, but due to the flooding up there we made it as far north as Cooktown on one of our day trips.
We had about 3 days to plan our new trip and repack for the different climate and environment. When we saw all of the amazing places we could visit, we got pretty excited about this new plan. We created a rough itinerary with our main stops to fit in with our time frame. The rest of it we would play by ear. When we travel, we don’t like to lock too much into place as we love the freedom of being flexible. Usually once we are on the road, I will look on WikiCamps for campsites near our destination. We look at the reviews and then go from there. Of course, at times this doesn’t always go to plan, but thankfully we haven’t been caught out too many times!
Over the next little while, I’ll share with you where we went on our trip! This trip turned out to be just what we needed! We had a lot more down days and covered about 3000kms instead. We absolutely loved the scenery and all the amazing places to explore. We definitely want to go back and explore more in that area.
