If only.......

I've often wondered where I got the love of travel from; I never tire of travelling especially into the bush and see the splendor of God’s creation, if only I could do it all the time! Perhaps as the song says ‘I was born under a wondering star’ but I like to think it was passed on from my folks. A year before Sputnik went into space and I was a seven year old my folks went to the UK and Europe for three months by boat the year was 1956. Since then they did many trips to various places in the world, they visited us in New Zealand for my 50th in 1999 and their last overseas trip to visit us in Australia in 2002.

Dad had a Blue one

As a family we did a mammoth tour of Southern Africa in 1958 with family friends in two VW 1100 cc Kombi’s we travelled from Johannesburg to Zimbabwe, Zambia (Southern and Northern Rhodesia back then) visited mum’s brother and his family in Ndola, then on to Beira (in Mozambique) Maputo (Lourenço Marques) and back home. We did many more memorable trips.

Skeleton Coast

When our eldest two daughters were three and four we had our first holiday at Amanzimtoti in a tent, we have traveled to England, Europe, Greece and Israel. We lived in Namibia for about six years and traveled all over in our first caravan, we visited Ai-Ais (I walked the Fish River Canyon twice - all 90Km), Etosha Pan, Ruacana Falls, Caprivi Strip, Swakopmund and many other interesting places. I even did a 4x4 trip to the Skeleton Coast all the way to the Kunene River mouth.

Back in South Africa we had a Jurgens caravan and had many happy holidays in it. We immigrated to New Zealand and travelled most of the South Island and many places in the North Island. I was transferred to Melbourne in 2001 and we purchased our first van in 2004, and did many enjoyable trips, we also started to 4x4 and soon found that we needed a camper van so we migrated to one, we then decided to sell it and get a cross over which was more comfy, but in July we decided to upgrade to the Snowy. I have been fortunate to have visited about 20 cities in the USA as well as Singapore, Bangkok, Phuket, Hong Kong and Shenzhen.







In-between caravan trips we have done many 4x4 trips with the tent, in 2004 we did a 7,700 Km trip to the ‘Red Centre’, crossed the Nullarbor, taken the ocean road to Adelaide, the coastal road to Brisbane, the inland road to Cairns and coastal road Cairns to Brisbane, crossed the Simpson desert, many times to the Victorian High Country, and more….. I’ll be doing periodic posts about these trips in the future so keep an eye out or you can just sign up then you will be notified when I post them.

I have done quite a bit of research in regard to places to visit on our trip next year, our eldest daughter has loaned us a Reader's Digest book called Australia's Most Scenic Drives which is very informative and helpful, showing many places of interest with short descriptions including maps with distances and photographs. We hope do do some serious planning in the next few weeks.

Until then …… keep the shiny side up