It has been almost 12 months since we set out on our Outback Queensland adventure - high time I wrote about it! We made the trip with another family - great friends of ours.
Our two families got together for dinner about three months before our planned travel and made a list of experiences from our respective 'bucket lists'. I highly recommend doing this. All four adults on the trip had researched different interests, and together we created an itinerary that was a lot more varied than it might have been had one person taken full responsibility for the planning. It also allowed us to talk face-to-face about budgets and plans, and it's much easier to 'read' someone else's keenness or reluctance in person than it is in writing. By putting all our ideas on the table, literally, we got off to a great start in just one evening and had a rough itinerary pretty quickly.
Here was our 'wish list':
Seeing dinosaur fossils, footprints and museums
Snorkelling - ideally around the southern part of the Great Barrier Reef
Fossicking for gems
Stargazing
Visiting Fraser Island
Whale watching
Visiting the QANTAS Museum for its centenary
Visiting the Stockman's Hall of Fame
Staying in high-end accommodation at least once
Visiting the Capricorn Caves
One of the motivations for our trip was to support the Queensland tourism industry. Like most parts of the world, Queensland suffered badly from the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic during 2020 - particularly the parts of the state that are normally tourist hotspots, like the Great Barrier Reef and the Gold Coast. We had stayed at the Gold Coast during the winter school holidays, and thought that the September/October spring holidays might be an excellent opportunity to head out west to support regional Queensland's tourism industry while, at the same time, getting some benefit ourselves from the lack of international tourists in these spots.
We booked our accommodation and experiences pretty quickly once we settled on an itinerary. From experience, we knew how difficult it could be to find availability for a group of six, and we were going to be looking for availability for a group of 10 (the other family was a 2 adult + 2 child family). We'd be needing rooms for two families at each of motels, and our family (with four children and two adults) would be a bit trickier to fit into small country town motel rooms. We started making enquiries and quickly realised that demand was high. We weren't alone in our thinking about heading Outback. Thankfully, we were able to build an itinerary that allowed us to stay in all the towns we had chosen with a few extra conversations with hosts about creative options.
Our planning went quite smoothly, but we had a brief period of nervousness at the beginning of September 2020. when there was a small outbreak of COVID-19 in our region. We wondered whether our area might be declared a 'hotspot', but, thankfully, things settled down and we were able to head off without any issues. Writing this in August 2021, we are still experiencing this sort of uncertainty about all travel in Australia. Hopefully things will be different in 12 months' time!
We made our Outback journey a road trip, with overnight stops for one or two nights at destinations which formed a loop from the Brisbane region out to Charleville, north to Longreach, east to Yeppoon and then south to the Brisbane region again. This route avoided covering the same ground twice, with the exception of day trips. Both families drove their regular family vehicles - our family in our Kia Carnival and the other family in their Kia SUV, so we had to book accommodation at each stop.
Here's a quick overview of the places we stayed overnight. I think I'll create posts about each leg of the trip to avoid overloading this post with information:
Night 1: Roma
Night 2: Charleville
Nights 3 - 5: Longreach
Night 6: Emerald
Nights 7 & 8: Yeppoon
Nights 9 - 11: Hervey Bay
It's pretty clear that our trip was a bit of a whirlwind! That's the way our family likes to travel, perhaps because six people in a hotel or motel room can quickly become a bit stir crazy! We tend to fill our schedule and plan rest times rather than waking up and deciding what to do 'on the fly'. Our friends were very accommodating, but I do wonder whether they realised our holiday would have quite the level of frenetic activity it ended up having! (As I said, they are good friends and we are all good communicators - it was fun and we all came home happy!) We were a bit limited with time due to the school holidays and our ability to take leave from work, and we all wanted some time to rest after the holiday before returning to school and work.
Overall, it was a good itinerary. If we were to change it for the future, I think I'd add one extra day in Longreach/Winton to see some more of the sights in the region and perhaps another day in Yeppoon or in the 1770/Agnes Water area, just for a rest. That would bring it to a 13-night, 14-day trip, which I think would suit most families.
I'll leave this post at that for now, and will make separate posts detailing the places we stayed and attractions we visited. Please feel free to shoot me an email if you have any questions about our trip!
- Jane
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