23 March 2015: Twinning Around Australia - the journey begins

Our trip finally started today and as the gods would have it in pouring rain.  Although we left our home Canberra a week ago we only managed to make it to my Mum's house in Narrawallee (which is just near Ulladulla).  The last week has been a time of rest, recovery and re-organising. Our departure from home had been hectic through to total chaos.  We thought we had given ourselves enough time to prepare but throw in a family issue or two out of our control and our last days in Canberra turned into sheer madness.  My methodical packing of our beautiful new (well new to us) van went out the door and instead things we thought we'd need ended up almost being thrown in and wedged as we sort of limped our way to the coast.

Anyway where are my manners, for those finding this blog on the web my name is Tracey and this is my first blog.  To those of you who know me, whilst talking is a forte, my expertise in social media is entirely lacking. But as we have embarked on the what we hope will be our family trip of a life time I thought it deserved chronicling so bear with me as I learn on the go.

Let me introduce you to the key characters in this hopefully "epic awesome" (to quote my kids) journey of ours.  Sharing this bold and maybe crazy idea is my husband David who like me never had any caravaning experience until well now.  However, we do share a love of traveling around this amazing country of ours.  A key reason for undertaking this trip was to show Australia to our twin sons Mr L and Mr C - now at an age to begin really appreciating travel.  The final and main character is COOL GEORGE our 2010 Jayco Expanda caravan.  Our boys named our van (and with no parental steering) in memory of a dear family friend who loved traveling and had died a couple of years ago.

Cool George is an 18 ft van with a pop out bed for David and I and twin bunks for the boys.  We bought our van off gumtree from a lovely couple in Newcastle who described their trips in it as glamping - we hope the same applies to us as we are planning to go a tad further than they did.  As compete novices to caravaning we did do a few things to improve our lamentable lack of knowledge and experience:

1. I read lots of other blogs (thank you to everyone for being so generous with their time to create such a wealth of experiences for people like us to draw on).
2. David (who is social media savy - well compared to me) joined a number of forums and again thanks to people for posting their collective wisdom there.
3. Had out van and car (which my lovely Mum and Stepdad have loaned us) fully checked and the car fitted with the latest electric brakes.
4. We did two courses which totally rocked!!!  A St John's Ambulance first aid course (as awesome as the one we did when our boys were born) and a TowEd towing course.  I cannot speak highly enough of this course which took me from an overwhelmed caravan sissy to hopefully able to tackle the highways of Australia and most importantly reverse a van into parks :) :)

So here we are driving down the highway to our very first caravan park in Merimbula.  Hopefully the weather improves, hopefully we have not bitten off too much more that we can chew and hopefully we get the van into the right spot without too much embarrassment - but I guess only time will answer these questions.