Getting ready for the road

We start our big lap across Australia in 1 month...

Our time in Tassie is fast wrapping up and alongside rushing to finish all our last jobs down here, we are feverishly preparing (both mentally and physically) for our big trip!

We leave Tasmania in mid-May and head up to NSW for about 10 days before we start our journey out west out to Broken Hill. Only our first 6 weeks are booked in so far, with the first major stop to be Uluru, followed by 11 days hiking the half of the Larapinta Trail we didn't manage to do last year. We managed to secure an early July booking on the Jatbula Trail and will spend 6 days there before exploring the rest of the Top End and then heading west to the Kimberley.

We’ve been stocking up on hiking food and dehydrating our own meals for the longer hikes. We’ve found homemade dehydrated meals are always tastier than store bought, even if it takes several days to prepare and dehydrate and package them up (hence we are planning ahead!)

We are also getting our car ready for being lived in for 6 months. Our planned sleep set up will most be relying on a tent, but we are adding a few features to the car to allow us to sleep in it in a pinch and use it as our kitchen/ living room including adding a drawer, drawer fridge, folding bed platform inside and a 270 awning so we can set up shelter around the car. We decided rooftop tents were not really our thing and where possible our preference will be to sleep away from where the car is parked, hopefully close to bush, rivers, beaches etc.

Fitting out the car has required a degree of learning on the job (thanks Youtube!). We’ve had to google hacks to pop rivnuts, places to find existing holes in a Prado 120 to mount drawers and where to find firewall grommets for cabling. Working on cars is not really our thing, so this trip has required a lot of up-skilling.

Now we are working on building the bed platform which can be folded out when the back seats are down to be pulled out level and supported to hold two of us if we need to lie down and sleep in the back, and then folded back into the boot while we are driving, so the back seats can be used again.

We’ve still got a couple of important things to sort out down here before we sail back up to the mainland. There will be a really exciting update about this coming soon!