I went on a 5000km road trip with my wife, friends, and their family, and it turned out to be one of the most beautiful journeys of my life. We travelled the “Explorers Way,” a route linking the Northern Australian city of Darwin to the Southern city of Adelaide. This road trip offered an exceptional opportunity to explore the Australian outback and discover the beauty of its most remote regions. Moreover, this trip was made even more interesting as we had some of the most fun people travelling with us.
How the plan came to be?
I have always wanted to explore the drive to Alice Springs/Uluru as I had heard so much about it. I shared this idea with my friends who were very keen to join us for an adventure. One thing led to another and one morning we woke up with a rooftop tent appear in our car magically. LOL. We all agreed to extend our Easter long weekend by taking a extra day off which finalized our plans for roadtrip. Preety simple planning, aye? We love to keep things simple and life fun.
The Travel Vehicle
We used 2 x 2018 Landcruiser Prado for this roadtrip. We had rooftop tents on each one of them and 4 people with fully packed belongings in the boot space. Both of us bought our car recently so this was the first longest trip we were going to do in the car. This was also an ultimate test of our new car.
The Vehicle Setup
I have always wanted to do the roadtrip in style with a rooftop tent in my car. I bought a second hand rooftop tent which was in a good condition. Choosing and installing the roof racks for our car was a big pain and took us the longest amount of time. We had hard time deciding on the roofrack system and at the end we went with the 3 bar crossbar system with Rhino Rack HD bars which had a dynamic load rating of 100kgs. We had to call through almost all the stores in Darwin/Katherine because none of the online vendors could have delivered the rhino racks before our trip. We were lucky we found Autobarn and they had most of the items we need for roof rack in stock and were able to get anything missing before our trip. Before a week to the trip, we had our roof racks installed and rooftop tents fitted into our car. We then said, “We are Ready”.
Before the trip
Travelling with friends is a lot easier and much more fun than travelling alone. Being 8 of us travelling, we started planning the trip about 2 months before where we had a rough idea of where we were going to stop, what we were going to do and where we were gonna visit. This was however very conditional until the start of our trip because of a road closure in Tennant Creek. Everyone was constantly watching the road reports and worried if there would be a change in plan. The main things we did before were:
- Planning the menu for each day– We had a menu for breakfast, lunch and dinner for each day which made it a lot easier.
- List of essential items of camping – This list made it super easy for us to not miss out anything and is also a lot easier in planning camping. I will put the list in a separate post so it is easy to reference.
- The road condition and accomodation – We were gonna be camping for the whole trip. We didnot book any sites because we were very unsure if we are really gonna reach the destination because of the road damages.
- Check car condition – We thoroughly checked the condition of the car and made sure it is ready to handle the long trip. I cleaned the glasses/windscreen and also applied RainX so the rain doesnot bothers us during the trip. I checked the fluid levels, tyre pressure, checked for any leaks in the car before the day of our trip.
- The shopping – We bought everything we required for the trip the day before the trip as we were worried that the stores might not be open anywhere else as we were travelling during the easter long weekend.
Check out the upcoming posts for our journey on each day during the trip.