Road trip!!

Last term my little family was lucky enough to be able to go on a 10 week road trip up the east coast of Australia together.  It's difficult to express just how wonderful it was.  As I've said to friends, where we went was almost an irrelevant factor - what was really special about it was to be able to spend all that time - hours, days, weeks on end, just hanging out together.  My husband had long service leave owing and so we were forced to take an extended holiday - how fantastic!  We were a little concerned about taking our 6 and 8 year old sons out of school for so long, but their teachers assured us that it would all be fine and that we'd be crazy not to take the opportunity.  

We knew that we wanted to go somewhere warm and sunny and it needed to be affordable for a whole term while still paying the regular mortgage. With three young boys, it needed to be somewhere that could be managed with them in tow, without causing us too much stress - the idea was to come back feeling relaxed after all!  We also thought it would be a great opportunity to connect with extended family, especially grandparents, for a more extended period of time, than school holidays usually allows.

Thus, the decision was made - it was to be an old-fashioned beach-hopping road trip from Timbertop to Cairns and back again. We traveled light - each of us had a small bag of clothes, there was a bag of books and toys to share and a few sleeping bags and mattresses.  On the back and top were our bikes - we each had one, except for little Teddy who had a seat on the back of mine. There were no ipads, ipods, DVD players or DS's for entertainment - the only form of communication was the phone. Basically we wanted the kids to talk to us and to each other and to look out the window at the scenery - you know the kind of hellish roadtrips we used to do as kids?? Well, here we were as parents, 30 years later, thinking that it would be a good idea to do that again!!

Our aim was to get to warm and sunny climes as quickly as possible. We stayed in cabins in caravan parks all the way up the coast. These were fantastic with so many activities for kids, usually beach frontage and not much packing up or cleaning for us each morning.  The first place we found what we were looking for was Kiama on south coast NSW. This was when we really started to relax and to believe that long service leave was really happening!

I won't bore you with all the details, but just mention a few highlights after Kiama....

There was Nambucca Heads on the north coast of NSW...

The Gold and Sunshine Coasts...

Yeppoon on the Central Queensland coast...

The Whitsundays...

Rainbow Beach just north of the Sunshine Coast...

Agnes Water, Central Queensland coast...

Burrum Heads, south central Queensland coast...

Lake Eacham and the Kuranda Historic Train on the Atherton Tableland, Far North Queensland...

As you can see, it was a very child-centred holiday.  Towards the end of the trip, my husband said to our kids, "Well boys, I hope you've had a good long service leave!"  Of course we all loved it - we were so lucky to have had such a wonderful opportunity.