Stage Two commences and is different from that originally planned

We had planned our trip around Australia into six sections and our first section has now been completed - Melbourne to Cape York and return to Cairns.  Each of our sections is planned to take approximately two months.  So we are ahead at the end of section one by five days!

We always planned that our trip around Australia would be flexible both in destination and timing.  So the first change is about to happen!  We had initially planned that the second section of our trip would be to go from Cairns to Broome via Darwin and many other places in between.  We have listened to many other travellers who we have met along the way and the recommendation has been to avoid going across the top of Australia in September/October as it is getting extremely hot and humid.  We talked this through and decided that the best thing to do would be to change our plans.  So we will now leave Cairns and travel west to Normanton/Karumba before heading south to Cloncurry (via Lawn Hill National Park) to Mt Isa.  From Mt Isa we will go to Tennant Creek and continue south through Central Australia to Alice Springs and that icon of Australia, Uluru.  From here we will proceed to Coober Pedy and then to Adelaide.  Of course, as we are good at doing, we will add in many side trips and places of interest along the way to make our trip unique to us and always interesting.

Once in Adelaide, we will consider putting the caravan into storage for 2-3 months while we return to Melbourne, and then take a 2-3 month trip to New Zealand.  More about that later!

We are yet to change our map on this blog which shows our route, but we will do this shortly.