100 days on the road; costs, experiences and heaps more

It’s hard to believe that we’ve already been on the road on our Big Lap of Australia for 100 days, but there you go! We left Perth on September 24, 2022, and headed straight across to South Australia, where we’ve been exploring and enjoying ourselves ever since.

If you are keen on where we’ve been, you can check out our Lap of Australia Itinerary, which we are continuously updating.

In case you haven’t been following us, we are travelling in a Isuzu Dmax, 2018 Reconn R2 Hybrid Camper, and have two boys that are 4 and 6 years old.

We’ll update this every 100 days

Now, the intention of this post is to give a bit of a summary of what we’ve been up to, a heap of statistics and anything else that is relevant, every 100 days. I’ll do another one at 200 days, and another at 300 and so on and so forth, with one massive post when we return home.

Why 100 days? It just seems like a nice, round number, and is the same every single time (unlike months). Doing it monthly is too hard (it takes a lot of time to compile all this, and do it correctly) and doesn’t seem necessary. 100 days also makes it easy to calculate costs per day, which is easy to work with for you, as readers.

Our intention is to be on the road for at least a year, and it wouldn’t surprise me if its much longer.

EDIT – Here’s our second 100 day travel costs, and our third 100 day travel costs.

Statistics

Total kilometres done: 8636km

Average number of kilometres each day: 86.36 (605km per week)

Diesel fuel consumed: 1301L (91L per week)

Average fuel economy: 14.3L/100km, towing a 2.3 tonne hybrid camper with our decked out Isuzu Dmax (see the Dmax review).

Most expensive diesel: $2.65L at Arkaroola

Cheapest diesel $1.929 per litre at Port Wakefield

Total fuel cost: $2797 (196 per week)

Total number of camp sites stayed at: 51

Average length of stay: 1.96 nights per stay

Camp sites cost breakdown (of the 51 destinations): 23 were paid but low cost (under $20), 14 were completely free, with 14 over $20 per night.

That makes it 45% low cost, 27% free and in total, 72.5% of our camp sites under $20 a night. The remaining 27% were over $20 per night.

In terms of the individual nights, 28 were completely free, 39 were under $20 and 33 were over $20 per night.

How many camp sites required grey water to be contained? One – Kadina Showgrounds

Number of nights in caravan parks: 8

Total camping fee costs: $1457 ($102 per week)

Average cost per night: $14.57

Most expensive camp site per night: Whyalla Caravan Park at $40 per night

Number of photos and videos taken: 21374, and about 600GB

Total cost of groceries: $3306.86 ($232 per week)

Eating out, bakeries and treats cost: $525.55 ($37 per week)

Experiences cost: $115 ($8 per week)

Total other random costs: $3116.39 (car service, new alternator, gas refills, water refills, washing, registration and insurance for the camper and Dmax)

Total cost for 100 days: $11346.8 ($794 per week)

Average cost per day: Around $113.5 per day.

Now, this does not include phone recharges, internet, health insurance, our satellite phone plan and other expenses that people will have wildly different (or no) costs of. I want to keep this documenting the base costs that people will have, without including random things that not everyone will have. I have record of these, but don’t want to make these posts less useful than they can be.

It completely ignores our home that is rented out, mortgage repayments, rates, house insurances and everything else, as this is not relevant to the vast majority, and makes the number crunching very unhelpful.

Please add your own additional, individual costs to this if you are relying on the numbers.

Favourite places/camp sites:

Bunda Cliffs and Arkaroola, Argadells, Carrow Wells, Memory Cove in the Lincoln National Park and Swincer Rocks

Overall feelings

We’ve well and truly settled into the travelling lifestyle, and although we had all done a lot of it in the past, there was still a period of settling in. Most days, life is far more relaxed, simple and enjoyable than it was at home with full time work, plus balancing this blog and all of the other commitments that people often have.

It’s certainly not been sunshine and lollipops, but when we’re having a frustrating or annoying moment I like to think about what its like in comparison to life at home, and almost all the time it pails into insignificance. There are days where your biggest worry is where you are going to get your vehicle serviced, and that makes for a pretty enjoyable life.

I will say that we’ve had some pretty average times, and average days as well, which are almost always centred around our kids behaviour, and them wearing us down. It’s tiring when you are all all in a small space, and dealing with kids being kids with no break is probably the most difficult part of the trip so far.

I’m super pleased that we’re maintaining a really low expenditure, as it means we can travel for longer. We’d read of families struggling to travel on less than $1500 a week, and that was a lot more than we wanted to be spending.

I have no doubt that our costs will go up as we travel further with less free camps, more experiences being done and so forth, but we’re doing really well so far!

Is there anything else you would like to know, that we can add in, and continue doing on our next 100 day costs posts?

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