The Adventures of Nick and Pam

This is the NUMBER ONE question we get asked about our trip! I’m actually really excited to share because I meant to do a six month check-in on our spending vs what we planned, but definitely didn’t prioritise it over the amazing beaches in Western Australia, and the six month point quickly slipped by! The last blog post ended with us in Sydney after finishing up our Tasmania tour. We arrived back in Sydney on the 13th of March, completing our circumnavigation of Australia (click here for a zoomable, scrollable map of our travels). We still had three months left of travels, but given that we spent them on two…

Pretend for a moment that it’s not the middle of June, and take yourself back to the second week of March instead. Where were you? What were you up to? What was the weather like? Do you remember? Now pretend you’re me and have so sorely neglected this blog that you’ve got to do exactly that – luckily we’ve taken about a million photos on this trip so I just cheat and go back through those to remind myself of the events I’m trying to capture! Here’s a map of what we cover in this post – you’ll notice it’s in Google Maps, as we’ve now hit the maximum number…

I can’t believe we’re on part six of the Tasmania posts. It really goes to show you how much is crammed into such a small state. We were there for four weeks and we’d go back to spend another four weeks in a heartbeat. Any trip like this one comes with a whole heap of unexpected surprises. Some are wonderful and awe-inspiring, but some are trip-disrupting and wallet-emptying. Tasmania was no exception – we started our time here needing to adjust our route to go east instead of west because of bushfires, and then had to deal with some minor health and mechanical issues along the way that ate up…

Those familiar with Australia may have heard of Bruny Island before, and maybe some of you are lucky to have actually been to it, but Nick and I had only a slight inkling about Bruny before we made it to Tassie. I think that a former boss of mine had mentioned it as an incredible foodie destination, and a few of our fellow foodie & winey (whiney?) friends had echoed his praises. I titled this post “Tassie Lovers Paradise” because on reflection, I feel that a lot of what’s amazing about Tasmania can be found in the very small area of Bruny Island. It’s remote (you have to take a…

Well, where to start with the Hobart entry…if you’ve been to Hobart, you know that there’s an incredible amount to see and do and eat and drink all in a relatively small city! Hobart, with a population of about 220,000, is Tasmania’s capital and the largest city on the small island (40% of Tassie peeps live there). You can read a bit more about the history on Hobart’s Wikipedia article – but the highlights for me are that it was founded in 1804 as a penal colony, and is Australia’s second-oldest capital city (after Sydney, natch). Our first stop, after checking into our adorable B&B, was to check out some of…

We may be suckers for punishment, because after our 17.5km day tackling the Wineglass Bay walk, we headed down to the Tasman Peninsula to tackle another one! The Tasman Peninsula is in the southeastern part of Tasmania, only about 75km southeast of Hobart, but for an area that’s so close to Tasmania’s largest city (population approximately 208,000), it’s chock-full of relatively untouched wilderness – our fave! Here’s a few maps to orient you to the ground we cover in this post – The Tasman Peninsula is connected to the Tasmania mainland by a 30 metre wide isthmus called Eaglehawk Neck, which presents a beautiful photo op, and a bit of…

After getting a bit of a soak as our introduction to Tassie, it was blue skies and sunshine again as we hit the east coast and started driving south along the gorgeous Bay of Fires, on our way to Freycinet National Park. Here’s a couple of maps of what’s covered in this post – the first is all of Tasmania, and the second is a detail of this post’s route, marked in red (previously covered) and green (this post). The Bay of Fires is…well…I’ll just quote from the Wikipedia article because it’s written better than I could manage: The Bay of Fires (indigenous name: larapuna) is a bay on the…

Tasmania!!! Wow. This was another huge milestone in our trip. Thinking back to when Nick and I were in planning mode, and our friends and family were asking about our route, I would tell them that all we had planned for this far ahead was to spend February in Tasmania, since that’s the end of summer and when it would be warmest (Tassie has a reputation for being a bit cold, according to Aussies – and acclimated Aussies, like me). Here’s a map of the area I’ll be covering in this blog post, courtesy of our favourite camping app WikiCamps! There’s both a detailed map, and a map of all…

Our stop in Melbourne was very brief, as we’ve now finished a complete circumnavigation of Australia, and are really trying to spend our time in places where we haven’t been before. Our Melbourne to-do list consisted of: an Apple Store appointment to drop off my Apple Watch for repair/replacement (it had developed a “bubble” in the screen while still under warranty); …a visit to a Jeep specialist to diagnose a mysterious noise the Jeep was making while cold (which he didn’t solve, but turned out to be an issue with our brake caliper which is currently being fixed as I write this in Tasmania)… …a visit to Lush to pick…

Our last post left us on our way out of the Barossa region with a few days to go before we had to be in Melbourne to catch our ferry to Tasmania. We still had a bit more of South Australia left to cover – the Fleurieu peninsula, one more wine region (the Coonawarra, famous for cool climate Cabernet Sauvignon), and a town called Mt Gambier, famous for an incredibly bright blue lake and the Umpherston Sinkhole. We were also missing a couple of big things on our list, namely McLaren Vale wine region, and the Grampians for hiking and camping, but as we’ve learned repeatedly on this trip, we…