A summary of our Up the Guts and Follow the Sun adventures (with apologies to William Shakespeare).

Overall Summary for our miniscule part of the Up the Guts trip:

3 days and 3 nights

792kms, Fuel cost $271.68

Accommodation $10.00*, or $3.33 per night (*RACV Total Care paid for our accommodation after the car broke down while we waited for it to be assessed, provided a car for our return journey and one nights accommodation on the way home).

 Overall Summary for our Follow the Sun trip:

65 days and 64 nights.

8220kms, Fuel cost $1586. That works out at 19cents per km.

Accommodation $1844, or $28.81 per night.

 We may not have reached Darwin but gee we had a good time.

 Things we’ve never seen before

Every trip brings something we’ve never seen before, a tiny spider or a stranded whale. This year it was Bustards (that’s the bird not Toothless), Emu chicks and Frill Necked Lizards (I’m still worried that I may have run over one).

 Misadventures

Is it any wonder I call it our winter of discontent, for this year if something was going to go wrong it surely did.

Toothless & his missus – The relatively new Diesel Heater died just when they needed it for cold desert nights and despite Toothless spending most of his non driving days completely rebuilding it, still it remained dead.

Prado’s – On the third day of the trip the TV had to be replaced. Petrol in the cars’ diesel tank was a pretty good start too. Of course, they locked themselves in the van once but we’ve come to expect them to do that at least once a year and at least they had a new TV to watch. Then Elle lost a diamond from her ring somewhere around the Red Centre, that will give someone a nice surprise one day a hundred years from now. When they reached the East Coast the van broke its leaf springs. Elle gave up on poor TV reception and purchased a new aerial and then a pipe burst on the hot water service.

Woody’s – That’s us! Cooking a car engine is not to be sneezed at and the cost of a replacement engine brought tears to our eyes but not as much as the flu that we caught while waiting for the car to be repaired. And before you ask, yes we had already had our flu shots, twice for both of us. Then the fridge decided that it didn’t want to run on gas (yes it did that last year too, different cause though). But the dizzy limit was when I tripped over a rubber parking strip on the road and cracked a rib, tore a tendon and sprained my shoulder joint. What a trip!