It’s all got a bit serious in NSW lately and while we sit chilling up here in Cairns, we are officially ‘locked out’ of WA. While we are in Queensland we can’t simply ‘hop across’ to WA and trundle home.

We were planning on heading further north, Port Douglas, Cooktown and up that way, but we are concerned that it may be just a matter of time before Covid raises it’s head more in Qld and we get stuck here. Things change so quickly that we could easily get wrong-footed, as thousands of other travellers are now.

Right now the NT still take people from Qld so we will aim to get in there by Thursday or Friday this week – or if things get ugly we will be there in one very long drive. We then have to spend 14 days in the NT before we can drive across to Kununnurra – although by the sounds of it, there is ‘no room at the inn’ right there. It’s busy up north so free camping will be our go to except when we need to do some washing etc.

So it’s around 3 weeks before we will be able to say ‘we will be home as planned’. In the scheme of things that is hardly a massive deal. When people are doing it as tough as they are in other parts of Oz we feel fortunate just to have made it this far with minimal disruptions to the schedule.

Our original plan was to turn left at Whyalla and head up to Alice Springs/Uluru and then across to Qld, before coming down the coast and going to Tassie in August. We are very glad we reshuffled Tassie to May, as right now we would have been heading back the way we came – and that wouldn’t have been heaps of fun. We have been dodging the virus each step of the way, with just 3 days of lockdown in Kirra – where it rained for that time anyway.

Right now we should get into WA mid August, giving us 6 weeks to trundle down the coast and make our way home. Depending on what day you ask me I could either come home tomorrow or travel indefinitely… But lately it’s been more of a yearning for home, mostly brought on by pain and a knowledge that at home I can begin to sort the problems more carefully.

So… unless things go nuts up here in Queensland, we expect to take that trajectory back home.