Day 10

We achieved two milestones today: we passed the Eastern-most part of the continent around Byron Bay and then crossed the border into Queensland – leaving NSW in our wake. Walking around Byron this morning Spike and I could see hints of what the town used to be. The beach remains fantastic of course but the town seems a bit like Newtown sur mer. 

We are currently camped in a large and not especially attractive van park in Brisvegas – next to Sea World, which we are unlikely to visit. We are looking forward to getting through Brisbane and on to areas where it will be easier to “free-camp”, ie, not in caravan parks. 

Our caravan was designed and built for free-camping with lots of solar panels and lithium batteries, meaning we can run all of our appliances each night and then the sun conveniently fills the batteries the next day. In the event of extended bad weather, we have a good little petrol generator. It might have to do extra duty to keep the air conditioning running when we cross the Nullarbor in January. Our  water supply will probably last four days without replenishment and we have an extra 80 litre bladder we can fill before we get too remote, to give us 6 days easily. With hindsight, we probably should have specified an extra tank in the van, although initially we had planned to tow with our farm truck and put 300 litres of extra water in that. We abandoned that idea for a variety  of reasons; fuel economy, size and probably most of all, the lack of 4WD, having got the whole rig bogged whilst we were even more novice than we still are. There’s a lot to learn about the Gypsy life.