After our two week road trip around New Zealand we returned to Australia for another week of fun down under. This time we arrived in Melbourne and decided to take a road trip on the Great Ocean Road which stretches for nearly 250 km along the southeast coast of the country. We rented a campervan through Jucy and had a blast. The van was a converted Toyota minivan which had the middle seats removed and replaced by a bench that…
New Zealand has a series of nine “Great Walks,” popular “tramping” (aka hiking + camping) trails that go through some of the most scenic parts of the country. My dad had heard great things about one of these hikes, the Routeburn Track, from his friend who is a New Zealand native so we decided to give it a try. Planning the Hike What is the Routeburn Track??! The Routeburn Track is located in the southwest of New Zealand, connecting Fiordland…
New Zealand is one of the places we’ve been most excited to visit; we heard great things about the people and expected the scenery to be awesome. It lived up to the hype and we had the most fun road trip here with my dad who flew to meet up with us for two weeks! What a treat! We rented a car from Rent-A-Dent in Christchurch (which is much nicer than it sounds) and spent two weeks exploring the South…
Our first afternoon in Sydney was spent wandering the neighborhood around the hostel and down to the harbor to get a view of the famous opera house and explore the city a little. For the first time in a long time, we ate at an Italian restaurant and we had noodles that weren’t fried with soy sauce. Our accommodation in Sydney was certainty an interesting place. The bed had a fitted sheet with cigarette burns and a top sheet with mold, which we…
We flew to Cairns, Australia for a chance to get up close and personal with the Great Barrier Reef. Cairns was a really lovely town with a beautiful waterfront “esplanade” (or promenade, as we would probably call it) and an amazing public pool. However, most visitors come to visit the Great Barrier Reef and this was of course the highlight of our visit! We signed up to visit the reef with Silverswift, one of the companies that offers diving tours. At…