In the past ten years of us living here we have been slowly filling up our map of Australia. But there was always this top left corner that was too far away and too remote to do in a single short holiday.
For a while now we have been planning on maybe doing it in two separate loop drives. But then we ended up doing the upper part of NT last year when Markus’ brother was here.
And really – why do we own a big 4WD, if we don’t use it for trips like this?

And so we started planning it with different stages where we would leave the car in certain places for a period of time and fly back to work in between.

What we ended up with was:
1) A weekend trip to Adelaide where we left the car for four days
2) A ten day trip over Easter where we would drive from Adelaide to Broome via the Great Central Road
3) A three week trip in June heading from Broome to Cairns over the Gibb River Road and the Savannah Way
4) A weekend trip from Cairns to Townsville
5) A weekend trip from Townsville to Mackay
6) A weekend trip from Mackay to Brisbane
7) And lastly a weekend trip from Brisbane to Sydney via Lightning Ridge

All in all we drove 17143km in 43 days to finish our loop around Australia.

Guess now we have to start zig-zagging through the middle …