Tasmania – In a Hire Van

It seems appropriate to revive this blog today as we have just ticked over 50% of our trip savings for our Big Lap. I’m really excited as this has put us nearly 6 months ahead of schedule and shifted our departure date from the end of next year to mid year, only 9 months away! Bizarrely COVID has really helped accelerate our savings. We have much lower living expenses in Tasmania, Matt got paid out an insane amount of leave from losing his job, I am being paid bonuses for working in Aged Care, and Centrelink repaid the ludicrous robo debt I was handed 7 years ago. The other good news is this calculation doesn’t even include our tax returns which we should be receiving in the next month.

Naturally because we are locked in Tasmania our big holiday for the year, that was meant to be driving our van back from Queensland, had to be around our beautiful island home. To make ourselves feel better about still being unable to pick up the delica we decided to hire someone elses and managed to pick up a Mercedes van for $900 for 10 days (with the top of the range insurance).

Matt wanted to leave the trip unplanned but I wanted to be organised so we compromised and decided to pencil out a route based on the places we wanted to go, tentatively book a few campgrounds and then do the activities we wanted to as we moved around. The itinerary we decided on was:

Day 1 – Freycinet
Day 2 – Bay of Fires
Day 3 – Petal Point
Day 4 – Narawntapu
Day 5 – Marrawah
Day 6 – The Tarkine
Day 7 – Strahan
Day 8 – Queenstown
Day 9 – Derwent Bridge

We aimed to include as many places that we could that one or both of us hadn’t been to before which took us off the beaten path and gave us the opportunity to experience something new.

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