What we got up to in Cairns: Spring cleaning our car…

The time has come where our trip will have some extra quests for a few weeks, Alex’s parents are joining us! Or as this post is a few weeks delayed, they have joined us…

If you have been following our trip closely you will know that Alex and I had expanded in terms of our belongings, when his sister Lianne flew back home to The Netherlands. So as you can imagine we had a little clearing to do.

Now when you live in your car, as we do, and by choice I might add, you can accumulate quite a bit. I guess it is the same as anyone with a house, we just have that on a smaller scale in a way. Of course we justified the use of everything from one point to another, but it was time to face the facts, clear the car or else no extra people will fit. And since Spring was here we might as well give the car a good clean as well.

So here is how we began, with everything in the car removed and placed in the space surrounding the car:

We had so much, with our back seats completely full, where everything was within easy access. The boot was also packed full, who knew we had so much stuff!

But to our surprise after a whole days clearing out and sorting through everything, this was our end result…yes it still looks a bit messy but in our eyes in this moment we were chuffed with ourselves and the cleanup we had completed/achieved:

Can you imagine that we were able to reduce our belongings to just the stuff confined to the boot and the roof?! It is crazy in the end what you actually need.

Now what did we do with all that excess stuff you ask?

Well firstly at the caravan park we were staying; Cairns Holiday Park, they had an area next to the kitchen where people could ‘donate’ unused or no longer needed items. This included food, cutlery, toilet paper rolls and other random stuff.

We did help ourselves to the extra toilet rolls there, because well you can never have too much toilet paper in your car for in the bush. But we also left quite a few of our items there, hoping they would go to a good home.

For the fun of it, and for anyone wanting to know what not to pack, we have written another little blog post about all the stuff we donated and in the end could have done without. For some, the items we got rid of can came in a lot of use, however for us they were just excessive when you took in everything we had. Because at the end of the day we also don’t want extra dishes, we are lazy cooks lets face it.

We have also put together a blog about the essential items we kept and in our eyes could have NOT gone with out thus far on this trip. We want to keep it as a record, and if it comes in use for anyone else going on a long camping trip or even a short one, then we are happy to offer some comical assistance in regards to packing.

So stay tuned if you wish to read all about what not to pack when going on a major road trip, as well as what we think is #essential for a trip around Aus. I am sure it will be useful…we ourselves should have Googled something like this before we departed. Instead we spent a whole day literally removing everything from our car onto the ground and sorting through it. #livinglife right?!

For us it was refreshing and a lot of fun, for others on the camp ground I think they were both fascinated at how much we had fit in our car, and what the hell we were doing taking it all out and laying it around like that.

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