Category: Trip

The Great Australian Road Trip

July 15, 2014

One day I’m going to drive around Australia. And I don’t just mean here and there, I mean drive all around Australia. As in this:

It’s a trip of almost 20,000 km, or over 200 straight hours of driving at 60 mph. That’s 40 days of driving 5 hours a day, which means this would be lengthy and expensive. But what a trip it would be!

I’d do the reverse route from the map above, starting in Sydney and heading north through Newcastle, Brisbane and all the way up to Cairns. That’s a few days right there, with many stops and things to see on the way. The beaches and coastal roads, especially as you get more and more north, would be beautiful.

And then a several-day trip to Darwin through the outback. Hundreds and hundreds of dry empty miles with not even a radio station on the radio. That would be quite an adventure!

The Darwin to Perth leg may take a week. It’s some of the least inhabited parts of Australia, but there are just enough small towns to make a daily stop possible. Accommodation on this leg may include a tent, or sleeping in the car! I may stay in a comfy hotel in Perth for a day or two to reset 🙂

Half the trip would now be complete and I’d be on the opposite side of the country. But the southern coasts are still to come, and some say these are the most beautiful roads in all of Australia.

It may take a week to get to Adelaide from Perth, stopping everywhere that looks interesting. Between the desert and the southern ocean there would certainly be a lot to see!

And then the windy roads along the Victorian coast would take me to the extreme southeast, at which I’d have to make a decision: Tasmania or no Tasmania? After 5 weeks on the road, who’s to say what I’d decide at that point?

Eventually the landscape would become vaguely familiar, as I drove into NSW and found myself within a few hours of Sydney. Six weeks after starting, I’d reach my destination: exactly where I started.

I’d have seen the entire country, and made enough memories to last me forever.

I’ll do this one day. I have to. Who wants to come with me?

The Fairest Port

June 13, 2014

Today we continued our cruise westward, heading past the marina where we rented the boat and towards more familiar locales.

The last lock we passed through was lock 30, just east of Macedon. This lock was 16.5 feet deep, and – as with all the locks we used – was gravity operated. Here’s a shot of KLS holding the line to prevent the boat from drifting during the locking procedure.

All told we went through locks 20 times on this trip! Here’s the last one closing us in:

To answer Alma’s question on yesterday’s post, the boat is 15 years old but the interior seems newer (you can still smell the wood). The bikes come with the boat. I wanted to ride one today but KLS wouldn’t let me since she thought I’d hurt myself 🙂

Here’s another interior shot from one of the bedrooms looking out the open side hatch while cruising:

The weather was very wet overnight, but cleared up quickly in the morning and as we cruised into Fairport – Jim’s hometown – we had sunny blue skies.

That’s a shot from the till.

That’s a school group we saw on the canal today. They were very friendly!

Fairport is the jewel of the canal, much more popular by far than any other port we’ve seen. It also has a lift bridge that raises upon request for boats. Since the main road happens to run across it, this means that twice today we stopped traffic to pass 🙂

Here’s some Fairport graffiti I saw under a bridge:

Here’s some baby ducks that swam up to our docked boat:

And here we are, right now, spending the night on a comfy boat not 10 minutes from the Friedland house (ours is on the right).

Tomorrow, in the early morning, we’ll head back eastward to return this vessel and bid adieu to the Erie Canal!

The sea is a harsh mistress, and spending these past few days in her arms has been simultaneously relaxing and exhausting, educational and inspirational, comforting and terrifying. We’ve gone places we never thought we’d go, and seen sights we never thought we’d see. I hope in some small way you enjoyed sharing our trip in this weblog 😉

Challenging The Head

June 13, 2014

Yesterday was another long cruise back along the canal, retracing our path from before. It was raining, but the boat is well protected even on deck. The bigger issue was I seem to have packed for Australia and therefore had no cold weather clothes! Luckily the boat is well equipped, and here is a time-lapse of my increasingly covered self at the till:

We’ve been mixing up the driving duties. KLS and myself do most of the normal driving, and we hand off to Foosrazzle for the ‘finesse work’ in the locks. The boat is 15 tonnes, flat bottomed, draws three feet of water, and manning the till can be quite physical in a current. And Bernard, there’s enough data there to calculate stopping distance from the max speed of 6 mph!

That’s a shot of one of the ‘heads’, which works the same as the ones at home. The shower, sinks – even oven – are all basically the same as well. This is a bit like a floating hotel room.

There’s me on one of the beds, looking a bit green. I was feeling a bit sickly yesterday, and very tired. I did many hours of driving in the AM and was almost asleep at the till. Rather than risk a tragic accident and the loss of all souls on board, I instead napped. Later in the evening we concluded my symptoms were possibly due to dehydration since I’d (sort of…) forgotten to drink for almost two days! I feel better now 🙂

Look at those pearly whites!!

The towns along the canal all have docks that provide services to boaters including power, water, septic pumping, garbage etc. This boat has an inverter that can generate AC from the engine, and also batteries, but we still connect to shore power at night. The water tank we fill daily, but (thankfully!) we don’t need to worry about pumping the sewer tanks!

Last night we stayed in Seneca Falls. We haven’t really done anything in the towns we have stayed since we’re very tired. However to give you an idea of the character of these fine towns here are a couple of snaps I took the past few days:

Here we are right now, docked in the town of Palmyra:

This is a famous berg in the history of Alien visitation sights. Google ‘Hill Cumorah’ for more information…

Today we’re heading west past Fairport (where JBF lives) and toward Rochester before turning and berthing tonight in Fairport. It’ll be rainy again, so you can look forward to more photos of me looking manly like a North Sea fisherman on the blog tomorrow 🙂

Robot Claw