Plan B

22nd January 2019, Moriac, Vic

Having discarded Plan A due to it being impossible we started to think about what would be possible rather than fantasise about what we wanted. The first thing would be to decide which trips would be feasible in time and cost.

We decided the must have trips would be.

• Road Trip – East Coast of Australia – up the centre and round the east coast
• Road Trip West Coast of Australia – up the centre and round the west coast
• RV across the USA
• RV across New Zealand

We started on a  new plan, aka Plan B. We started by looking at how long each trip might take and when in the year would be best. 

We need to do North Australia in the (Australian) winter as it is too hot and not in the rainy season as the roads become impassable. We need to do the US trip in (Northern Hemisphere) Spring and Early Summer as winter is too cold and so on. After some juggling we came up with the following, which seems to fit the various criteria;

Trip 1 East Coast Australia – 20th Oct 19 to 15th Dec 19 – 60 Days

Trip 2 New Zealand – 13th Jan 2020 – 3rd Feb 2020 – 21 Days

Trip 3 USA (with side trips to the island of Exumas and UK) – 2nd Mar 2020 to 31st May 2020 – 90 Days

Trip 4 West Coast Australia 17th Jun 2020 – 15th Sep 2020 – 90 Days

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Precise itineraries for each trip will be available for anyone who wants to meet us anywhere/somewhere on the road ahead.

Now for the tricky part, how much will it all cost?
MS Excel is a wonderful tool! We constructed a detailed budget for each trip, looking at number of days, cost of flights, fuel, accommodation, food, spending money etc etc. The end result was a very big number and even though Jules still gets her salary during the year, it would stretch our resources considerably. However, with some judicial cost cutting, letting out our house for the year, and by getting a much cheaper drone (have to have one for the aerial photography!) we managed to bring it back into something almost feasible.

We have now got a plan!