When on a road trip in Australia, you’ll quickly notice it has a lot of endless roads crossing through fields, forests, and mountains. At times you’ll see a group of mailboxes standing together at the side of the street, watching the few cars passing, waiting for the mailman to fill them up. Every once in a while you’ll see farms in the middle of nowhere and come across little towns made up of a couple of houses huddled together along the big road. Although there’s a lot of beautiful nature surrounding you while driving, you’ll probably get a bit bored after a while. That’s why we’ve listed some things you can do to keep yourself entertained on a road trip in Australia.
How to keep yourself entertained on a road trip in general
Driving long distances can be part of any road trip, no matter where you are. You know, those inevitable long boring stretches of road where there’s nothing interesting to see. Here are some tips to keep yourself entertained on a road trip like that.
Geocaching
Our favourite way of keeping ourselves entertained on a road trip is Geocaching. Either you know it and you’re way into it, or you haven’t heard of it and you’re missing out big time. But what is geocaching? This is how they describe it on the offical Geocaching website:
Geocaching is a real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices.
We not only do it while on a road trip, but also go on geocache hunts in every city we visit. It’s a great way to help you discover secret spots and hidden views only locals know about. They are usually the ones that hid those geocaches in the first place!
There are an awful lot of geocaches hidden all over Australia, nearly 75,000 if you like numbers, impossible to stop for each and every one. Instead we filtered on favourite points, leaving only the best geocaches. Brecht prepared where we would be stopping beforehand, making sure we could take a meaningful break of driving every once in a while while not having to depend on mobile data (which can be tricky in some parts of Australia).
We love Geocaching while on a road trip. It’s great to have something to do when pulling over for a needed break when you’re driving 500 km or more a day. Apart from that it has taken us to lots of great viewpoints as well. Many of the Geocaching stops we did, have picnic tables. And more than expected even have a toilet (with toilet paper!).
By now you’re probably excited to get outside and start Geocaching. But how? It’s simple, really. You just need a GPS device or a GPS-enabled mobile phone to navigate to the geocache, and a pen to write your name in the logbook inside the cache. You don’t need internet connection, you can go geocaching offline as well if you prepare. Go try it, it’s fun!
For more information on Geocaching, head to the official Geocaching website.
Listening to music, podcasts and audio books
The most common way to keep yourself entertained on a road trip is listening to music. Wether it’s the local radio or a road trip playlist, music is present on every road trip. What’s more fun than singing along to your favourite song at the top of your voice? Chances are it becomes that song that’ll always remind you of that one road trip. #makingmemories
When you’re spending whole days in the car, you’ll quickly become tired of having to hear to same songs over and over again. Listen to podcasts or audio books to change things up. It can also be an effective way of helping you fall asleep (hopefully not the one in the driver seat though). During our road trips in Australia, New Zealand and the USA we frequently listened to the This American Life Podcast and the Game of Thrones audio book, among others.
In our Spaceships Campervan we had a radio with a USB and iPod port, handy!
Playing car games
Car games are one of the most used ways to keep your kids entertained on a road trip. It doesn’t have to be for kids only though, it can be fun for adults too! One we played regularly is Word Snake. You choose a category, like animals or girl names, and a word to start with. Every player has to say a word within the category that starts with the last letter of the word the previous player said. You can be as creative as you like with the categories.
Another version of Word Snake is The Alphabet Categories, where you name a word within the category for every letter of the alphabet.
If you like singing along with the radio, like us, you will definitely like what we in Belgium call the “Stop de band ronde”. Someone turns off the volume of the radio in the middle of the song and the trick is to keep on singing and coincide with the song when turning the volume back up.
If you need more inspiration for car or road trip games, the internet is overflowing with them. A short Google session will certainly get you laughing about all the ridiculous car games that exist. I know I did.
How to keep yourself entertained on a road trip in Australia
Our road trip in Australia was our longest ever. We lived for 3 months on end out of a small Spaceships Campervan, driving 13,429 km (8,344 miles). That’s a lot of long boring stretches of road. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling Australia boring, quite the opposite, but after a while you get tired of watching the landscape passing by. Here are some tips to keep yourself entertained on a road trip in Australia.
Spotting wildlife
There’s lots of wildlife in Australia, so one of our favourite pastimes during our road trip there was spotting wildlife. We spotted kangaroos, koalas, cows and emus, most of them while driving through the Australian Outback. The later it gets, the higher the chance you’ll spot wildlife, especially kangaroos. We avoided driving in the dark however, as the chance of hitting an animal is higher as well.
Spotting license plate slogans
I don’t know if you know about license plates in Australia, but they have slogans per state. How awesome is that?! As soon as I found out, I made it my mission to spot as many different slogans as possible. My favourite ones were “Relax, it’s Queensland” and “VIC – Stay Alert Stay Alive”. I won’t spoil the fun by naming them all, but I’ll have to warn you that New South Wales license plates don’t have a slogan. Boring!
Hopefully these tips will help keeping yourself entertained on a road trip in Australia or anywhere else in the world. Drive safe!
What’s your favourite way of staying entertained on a road trip? We’d love to read all about it in the comments!
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