How to Survive a Road Trip
Happy Monday!
I took a break from the blog last week because Tj and I were on vacation! Both Good Friday and Easter Monday are public holidays in Victoria. And Thursday, April 25 is Anzac Day (read more about Anzac Day here). So we took off the rest of the week and suddenly we had a decent amount of travel time without using a lot of vacation days.
We rented a car with a minimal idea of where we were going and we were off!
We drove through Sydney and up the coast of New South Wales into Queensland and then back to Melbourne with stops at many beautiful beaches along the way. The furthest we went was the Gold Coast, which is about 17.5 hours drive from Melbourne. I have some great posts planned about where we went but today is about the road trip in general.
First thing to note, in Australia they really stick to the speed limit. There are speed cameras everywhere! And because of all the holidays, there were lots of warnings double demerits applied during this time. We definitely saw lots of police on the roads.
Lucky for me, Tj is an absolute pro-driver. He is so good at driving on the wrong side of the road now. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but he did all the driving on the whole trip! To be fair, I did offer to drive more than once but he just wanted to do it all himself (I swear!). He was just really excited to be on this road trip!
My job is to navigate, change the music, and generally entertain Tj and make sure he doesn’t get tired. With Tj, I also have to make sure he doesn’t get too excited and forget to focus when he gets sight of a good city skyline or a glimpse of the ocean.
Here are our top 10 things to survive a road trip (Tj actually helped me come up with this list while we were driving home haha):
A good travel partner (aww thanks Tj)
Snacks (although next time we would prepare more healthy snacks. I am so sick of McDonald’s, or Macca’s as they call it in Australia! The oreo blizzards are not the same ratio of oreo to ice cream that I’m used to).
Pillow
Water
Lots of napkins
Podcast and audiobook options (you need options in case you don’t get into the first one you try. Tj settled for the third option, but it took him a while to get into it)
Phone charger
GPS (note: there is no way to tell the quality of the road Google maps is sending you down. We found this out the hard way where we ended up on a very unsuitable dirt road *see list of things we saw cross the road below)
Sunglasses (we could’ve used sunscreen in the car too but it was in the trunk)
A playlist with more than five songs (Tj got some new music and just wanted to listen to the same songs on repeat. I could’ve used some more variety lol)
Our biggest road trip fail was renting a car without cruise control!! Tj developed a strategy were he would find a car going the speed he wanted to be at and just follow them for a really long time LOL.
Some things we saw cross the road:
A cow
A chicken
A kangaroo
Stay tuned for more about our travels over the next few weeks.
Have a great week :)
