Daily Update #05 – Australia & New Zealand 2018

a short drive

Who am I kidding? We left Canberra today, drove through both New South Wales and Victoria state to end in South Australia this evening.  Why?  That’s a great question!

it’s the journey!

When we were planning this trip I wanted to minimize time spent backtracking.  In order to succeed in this goal, it required us to either leapfrog to our furtherest destination in one day, or to make several days to drive out and back.  As you can tell by this post we opted to have one gigantically long drive to make tomorrow shorter, and to have a weekend to enjoy Melbourne, without 100+km to cover.

we drove 1,000+ km today

Ugh.  I like driving however, the enjoyment factor disappears when night falls, you’re hours away from the hotel, and you begin to think the Kangaroo warning signs are there for night time not day time driving. 

During the day we saw countless sheep and cattle.  On a few occasions there were sheep with ever so cute lamb nearby, and with zero traffic on the road I slowed so that we could appreciate their beauty.

We started in Canberra, and have ended our day in Mount Gambier, South Australia [Google it, we crossed a time zone and spent many hours driving rural roads.  The lack of nighttime driving love came accompanied by Amber’s excitement — Kangaroos. The pattern we have noticed is that Kangaroos spotted during the daytime aren’t breathing, and are on the side of the road.

At night, these critters are lovingly located a few feet away from the road.  The first ones we spotted occurred while we were following a transport to help light our way — as it entered a winding right turn two Kangaroos were hopping in the rough just outside of the curve of the road. Cool to see, however as the evening wore on, they did appear bigger, and closer to the road.  I didn’t want to meet one up close with the vehicle.

We succeeded in that, and avoided the rabbit crossing the road as well.

Stars

The benefit of driving through rural areas at night were the stars.  It was a clear night and you could easily see tens, if not hundreds just by glancing out the side window.  If you stopped and took time for your eyes to adjust there were even more.  Absolutely mesmerizing!

Pictures, stories and another update tomorrow.  Until then, have a great day!