WHAT’S the first thing you do when planning a holiday? Check out the best prices on Teletext, hunt online for the most attractive all-inclusive deal or nip down to your nearest travel agent and hope not to become a victim of “the computer says no“?
Justine of The Potty Diaries does none of these things and here she shares her story of how a DIY holiday doesn’t have to spell disaster.
MY husband is a firm believer in Do It Yourself. Not in the home, you understand. Well, not following the unfortunate incident with the children’s bunkbeds and the lost instructions, at any rate… No, he is instead a firm believer in Do It Yourself Holidays. This is of course fine when it’s just the two of you and a backpack, but once the children arrived you might be forgiven for thinking that we would now need to buckle down and get with the holiday companies’ programmes.
Not a bit of it.
We’ve had some great holidays since our children were born, and not one of them have we booked through a holiday company. I wouldn’t say that doing it yourself has necessarily been cheaper than going with a bulk-standard alternative, but this is more often because, once you make yourself aware of what you can get for more your money, you decide to spend the same amount on something better than you would otherwise have got booking it via a third party.
But also – and more crucially, for us at least – we get to do what we want, when we want to.
And when, last year, my husband was one of the first casualties of the dreaded crunch, the first thing he said when he phoned to tell me he was temporarily out of work was “You know that long trip we always talked about taking…?”
So we decided to head to Australia for five weeks, with our two sons then aged two and four years.
Now, this was not the result of long-held dream on our part. We had never really been that interested in visiting down under, mainly because of the distances involved and our understanding of how vast the continent is. But suddenly we had some time on our hands and no school holiday schedule yet to deal with. We decided that now was as good a time as any to go for it.
We bought some guidebooks. We did a lot of research. We spent a lot of time online. And we decided to plan it ourselves. Let’s be honest here, my husband decided to plan it himself. And the rest of us went along for the ride...
Given how huge the country is, we decided to restrict our schedule to the Eastern coast. We were keen to give ourselves and the boys some rest periods and not move on every night in a ‘Today’s Tuesday so it must Sydney’ whirlwind, but even so there were times when that was necessary to fit in everything we wanted…
Flying in via Bangkok, where we spent one night to try and acclimatise ourselves to the time difference, we spent a week in Sydney. We stayed in a serviced apartment and took the opportunity to get a proper feel for the city, even heading out to the Blue Mountains for the day in a hire car.
Then we hopped over to Melbourne and spent the next three days to driving the Great Ocean Road to Adelaide. Here we picked up a 4×4 and spent three days off-road in the Flinders Ranges, before flying from Adelaide to Brisbane, where we collected a camper van for five days.
We then drove partway up the Queensland coast, to Bundaberg, and back. Following that we flew from Brisbane to Cairns, spent five days in Port Douglas, and then moved for a couple of nights to an island on the inner Great Barrier Reef. Our last stop was Sydney, before we headed back to the UK, via two nights in Singapore.
It was fantastic. And not a tourist rep or a travel company in sight.
(Stay tuned for more detailed accounts of the different parts of our Australian idyll…)
* A big thanks to Justine for contributing this. I can’t wait to read further instalments. As someone who thinks it’s adventurous to not turn up at the rep’s welcome meeting, I’m pretty inspired by this experience.
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