Final Thoughts – Simon

A tad belated but herewith my thoughts on the trip…

All up totally concur with Steve’s words as below, especially about how surprisingly unstressed the whole trip was helped greatly by excellent company, car, roads, weather, music, etc.

Have to admit that having committed to the trip (that extra bottle of wine still haunting me) I was a tad anxious about how I would actually cope with 4 very full days confined to a car - not too dissimilar time wise to flying Sydney/London/Sydney/London in one hit!

But the reality was very different as amazingly it was very easy going, hugely interesting and something that I would absolutely do again, albeit that I might take a little extra time to take in a few of the many sights we missed along the way.

The folk you meet on the road are in the main fascinating and somehow we regained the power to actually talk to total strangers, the bond being that we were pretty much out on our own in a vast country! The peculiar part was that after just 4 days out amongst pretty much nothing, adjusting to city traffic (yes Perth seems to have discovered a genuine rush hour too!) was something of a shock.

Agree with Steve that amazing how given the opportunity to speed, what with the vast distances of nothing, no one actually did almost as if by doing so it would somehow add to the stress/angst and all in all would not actually get you anywhere that much faster.

Having a GPS is a must and wholly recommend setting it for a series of waypoints to add a feeling of cutting the trip into bite sized chunks – that said make sure the overall settings are for ‘quickest’ rather than ‘shortest’ as we must have been the only guys to get forced into taking 2 ferry crossings going Sydney to Perth! That said nothing like having a map too and sadly we did succumb to buying one at the end of day 2 – not that we ever looked at it of course! ;-)

High spots: the hotel rooms (!), very funny evening dinners, the ferry trips, the Super Pit, the car, seeing the Gooding tribe again and actually ‘flying’ rather than driving home – 4 hours v. 4 days!

Low spots: the hotel rooms (!), excess gas and the trip coming to an end about 3 days short – I could have gone on longer and would have enjoyed it just as much!

In conclusion the trip, short as it was in overall time but long on distance, was something of a cathartic experience and gave me a greater appreciation about the bush, the people out there and more importantly that it’s wonderful to be able to spend time talking absolute bollocks with a great mate who I don’t see enough!

Thank you Steve & Kim for the opportunity and anytime you need the next car delivered please count me in as would not miss it for the world.

Thank you Godding’s and enjoy the car…

Simon