[August 2026] Robyn and I are spending our first year in Australia completing “The Big Lap”. Our first month has taken us from Sydney, through Broken Hill, up the Oodnadatta Track, through Uluru, the West Macdonald Range and on to Darwin.
We’ve camped the entire month except for one very rainy night. We often stay in Caravan Parks (since they are ubiquitous), but prefer “Hipcamps” (similar to airbnb), which often have a lot more space and we are sometimes alone. These are often on “stations” (ranches).
We are learning as we go. (Bring more food than you think you need!) and getting the car slowly set up. In Darwin we are adding a long range fuel tank (to help us manage the crazy fuel prices!) and a snorkel (lots of bulldust on the tracks in our near future).
We named our new Hilux, Grumpy, because it’s always beeping at us. So much so that it’s hard to know what it is beeping about. Maybe we are too close to another car, or a seatbelt isn’t plugged in or maybe we are driving too fast? Who knows? It’s good to try and figure it out though – in Alice Springs I left the car turned on and unlocked as I was heading into a mall! Since the engine often turns off when we aren’t moving, it’s sometime hard to know if the car is turned on or not!
Click on any picture to open up a slideshow.
The waterfront in Darwin.Our campground in Darwin gave us this helpful reference guide to help us identify the 12 different types of snakes that might kill us!Litchfield National Park is all about finding pools to swim in to escape the heat!Wheelchair accessible viewpoint in Litchfield NP.Bird watching over a swamp in Litchfield NP.Magnetic Termite Mounds – these termites build thin mounds in a north south orientation which helps keep half the mound in the shade at all times.Cathedral Termite moundsDrive through liquor store in the NTPeople like to dress up the termite mounds on the side of the road.Daly Waters pub – supposedly the oldest pub in the NT. Check out all the bra’s hanging in the back!Road trains are a feature of the outback.We visited Robyn’s cousin, Wendy, in Tennant Creek.The Karlu Karlu – Devil’s Marbles just off the Stuart Higway.Stuart Highway, linking Adelaide to Darwin. Mostly just a quiet two lane road!The Todd River in Darwin. Unusually high water levels due to lots of recent rain – usually it’s completely dry!Robyn tries her hand at tapping out some morse code at the telegraph station in Alice Springs.Practicing tire puncture repair with a tire I picked up off the side of the road.Standley Chasm in the West Macdonald Ranges.Ormiston Gorge in the West Macs.The ochre pits, used by aboriginals for thousands of years to create pigment for rock art and body paint.Desert Palm trees in Palm valley.Wild horses along the Mereenie loop.The Mereenie loop from Alice Springs to the West Macs.Dinner prep time at our campsite near Kings Canyon.Kings CanyonKata Tjuta, near Uluru.Trail run in Kata Tjuta,We were able to push 10kms around the base trail of Uluru.One of the colorful road houses along the Oodnadatta Track.Wild camping along the Oodnadatta track at the ruins of a telegraph repair station.Pub in Williams Creek.The Oodnadatta Track follows the old telgraph line though the middle of the continent.Some of the old telgraph poles. The original ones were wood and some of the slightly ‘newer’ ones were iron.Ruins of one of the telegraph maintainence stations.Oodanatta TrackCoward Springs – a great campsite along the track.Coward Springs had date plantations planted by Afghan cameleers 100+ years ago – making for great scones today!The campground at Coward Springs was largely built from old railway ties.For a couple days we overlapped with the Shitbox Rally which made us feel a lot better about the possibility of getting stuck at some sketchy crossings. The track was closed the day before we started and the day after we finished – lots of rain!Fun sculpture park along the track.Crossing a fence along the track, designed to keep out the dingos.Cars from the shitbox rally fueling up.Camping at a station in the Flinders Ranges.Camping at a Hipcamp near Petersborough.Mad Max museum near Broken Hill (where the movie was filmed). Yummy milk bar in Broken Hill.Royal Flying Doctors museum in Broken Hill.Pro Hart museum in Broken Hill.Robyn and I both try to exercises as often as possible. For Robyn, that often means walking with her walking frame.Start of our trip in Sydney
