{"id":21926,"date":"2011-03-09T04:38:35","date_gmt":"2011-03-09T09:38:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/21926\/road-trip-junkie-dreams\/"},"modified":"2011-03-09T04:38:35","modified_gmt":"2011-03-09T09:38:35","slug":"road-trip-junkie-dreams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/21926\/road-trip-junkie-dreams\/","title":{"rendered":"Road Trip Junkie Dreams"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a road trip junkie.\u00a0 I proudly admit it.\u00a0 For me there is no better way to take a vacation.\u00a0 I don\u2019t care what you put me in.\u00a0 Car, truck or RV, as long as it can go down a highway, by-way, or scenic route, without any major problems, it\u2019s all good.\u00a0 On-road or off-road, I\u2019m there.\u00a0 Well, unless you want to go on a motorcycle.\u00a0 This girl doesn\u2019t do motorcycles.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I have driven, or have been driven, down at least one roadway in every state west of the Mississippi, Illinois and Florida.\u00a0 In my home state of Nevada, I have traveled every highway and so many dirt roads that I lost count years ago.\u00a0 I have explored the roadways of portions of Canada and Mexico.\u00a0 So many miles traveled with so many memories that sometimes they tend to blend together.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Some trips took months to plan and others were taken on a whim.\u00a0 Some were great, some were just good, but not even the worst one has ever swayed my love of the road trip.\u00a0 Each one just makes me want for the next one.\u00a0 And, the next one.\u00a0 And, the next one.\u00a0 One thing that\u2019s guaranteed is that there\u2019s always a road you haven\u2019t been on.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Then there are the dream trips.\u00a0 Places you want to drive through, but probably never will for one reason or another.\u00a0 Sometimes it\u2019s the money.\u00a0 Sometimes it\u2019s the logistics.\u00a0 Sometimes it\u2019s just the way life happens to play out at any given moment.\u00a0 Sometimes, though, a road trip junkie can get lucky.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

For years, decades even, the Man and I dreamed of taking a trip to Australia.\u00a0 Whenever we saw a movie set in Australia, or read a travel article, or watched an animal show about kangaroos or koalas, we talked of going \u201csomeday\u201d. \u00a0We made \u201cdream plans\u201d, those off-the-cuff conversations of things we would like to do, or see, if and when we got the chance.\u00a0 We talked of spending some serious time to explore the things we had heard about, or read about, or seen on some screen.\u00a0 We always knew that a trip to Australia, let alone a dream road trip, would probably be one of those \u201cwhen you\u2019ve got the time, you don\u2019t have the money and when you\u2019ve got the money, you don\u2019t have the time\u201d things, but we always dreamed of it anyway.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know exactly how it happened, or what may have caused it to happen, but the time-space continuum warped and bent in just the right way and we found ourselves with not only the time, but with proper trip budgeting, also the money, to take advantage of \u201csomeday\u201d.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t enough to do the dream trek through Australia as we had discussed for lo these many years, but it was enough to make a pretty good attempt at half of it.\u00a0 Since nobody\u2019s getting any younger and there\u2019s usually no second chance, we decided an attempt at half the country would be better than never going at all.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

We ordered maps, applied for visas, researched airlines, vehicle rental companies, and travel\/medical insurance.\u00a0 We calculated and recalculated mileages and time.\u00a0 We calculated and recalculated budgets of our resources.\u00a0 We checked calendars and historical weather records.\u00a0 We read through Australia road laws.\u00a0 We made packing lists and configured baggage layouts.\u00a0 We worked an itinerary and started making bookings and reservations.\u00a0 It took months of planning, but our great Australian road trip was to be a reality.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The plan was that for 29 days it was the Man and I traveling over 11,000 kilometers (that\u2019s like over 6,800 miles to us Americans) around the eastern half of Australia in a motorhome.\u00a0 I kept a journal of our travels and am finally finding the desire to transcribe the pages.\u00a0 I will be posting them to an online travel journal on another site and decided I should post them here to share with anyone that may be interested.\u00a0 Even if you\u2019re not interested, I\u2019m posting them here anyway.\u00a0 You never know when you might need a brief respite from the politics.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a road trip junkie.\u00a0 I proudly admit it.\u00a0 For me there is no better way to take a vacation.\u00a0 I don\u2019t care what you put me in.\u00a0 Car, truck or RV, as long as it can go down a highway, by-way, or scenic route, without any major problems, it\u2019s all good.\u00a0 On-road or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2,25],"tags":[651,2434,2433,2432,2431,2435],"class_list":["post-21926","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","category-other","category-world","tag-australia","tag-driving","tag-exploring","tag-motorhome","tag-road-trip","tag-traveling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21926","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21926"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21926\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21926"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21926"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/friendburst.com\/blog-new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21926"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}