Our hand has been forced
Well seeing as COVID-19 has wrecked our plan and seeing as the cars gearbox still isn’t done we’ve decided to wait a while and aim for the Birdsville Races in 2021. Hopefully by then all the COVID-19 messing around will be minimised to the extent that we’ll be able to travel. By then the rebuilt gearbox will have had a few trips to prove itself too.
The first thing to do is to plot a map and make an approximate fuel use and cost spreadsheet. The map is from Google Maps as are the distances and driving times. The spreadsheet is just something that I do for every trip to try and predict distances, fuel use, driving time and so on.
The first draft of the new route
A bit more detail
As you can see we have added more to the trip so we can take in the Birdsville Races. We went to the races in 2017 and had a great time, apart from a few flat tyres, so seeing as 2017 was a great trip we’ve decided to incorporate the races into our big trip.
Last time we went up to Birdsville via Western NSW – Tibooburra, Cameron Corner, Innamincka, etc. but this time we’ll go to Birdsville via Bourke, Quilpie, Windorah and on to Birdsville.
After the races we’ll head on over to Alice Springs via Bedourie and Boulia and after a restock we’ll head on up to Darwin and Kakadu.
After a bit of a poke around we’ll head over to Broome and down via Geraldton to Perth. From there we’ll go down to Albany and then across the Nullarbor to Moe via Adelaide.
In total Google maps tells me it’ll be a bit over 13,000 km’s. Of course it’ll be further than that because I haven’t mapped the side trips – Kakadu, west coast, south coast, etc.
And so to a spreadsheet.
As mentioned in other posts, and earlier in this one, I like to make a bit of a spreadsheet for each trip. I’ve put two versions of the first draft for this trip up – OpenOffice and MS Excel. Feel free to download them and use them if you wish.
It’s a pretty simple spreadsheet and is subject to change as we go along. It comes along with us on a laptop so we can change it, add to it, add notes, etc. Call it a rough outline of the trip and as with the map it’ll change. We’ll being doing detours, side trips, unscheduled stops, etc. along the way – especially Kakadu, the west and south coasts, and other places.