Monday, April 21, 2014

The car and camper trailer


In March we bought a Toyato 4WD and sold the beloved Corolla station wagon- actually, we managed to sell the latter to the family that we bought the Prado off in a stroke of good fortune. Since then we have added a few outback accoutrements: 
  • shade awning (easier than carrying a tree in a treeless desert), 
  • bull-bar, so that an unfortunate kangaroo or emu hopefully does not end our trip early
  • a camper trailer for authentic bush look - basically a box trailer with a queen size bed and canvas tent instead of a lid.  It's all steel with plastic boxes so it can (again, hopefully) handle 10,000km of corrugated outback roads
  • A fridge and 160 Watt solar panels to charge the batteries in the trailer.
These pictures are from our second practice trip to Lake Leslie on the Easter Long Weekend with Mel and her family from Tony's work. This was the first trip with the canoe and kayak on board. All went well (and the Easter bunny found us - or at least her agent).


Wednesday, April 16, 2014

The plan

At some point in February or so we moved our "We'll do it next year plan" forward by a year. We are taking long service leave, the kids out of school for a term, and heading across the country in a giant loop. The ideas is to visit the Northern Territory, northern WA and come home via the red-centre. We have 90 days, and about 15,000km to cover. Perhaps foolishly, we are taking a kayak and canoe across the desert in search of rivers, gorges and still oceans. Hence the blog address: desertkayaks.blogspot.com.au.

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