For the next week, we are staying at the Mantra as previously mentioned. So I will split the holiday up as two trips.
This post will be the final numbers.

Facts and Figures
From the time we left home until arriving here in Brisbane we have..

• Been away for 16 nights
• Spent a total of $4227.59
• Travelled 3464kms
• Spent $233.60 on fuel, which breaks down
  to fuel usage of 4.33l/100km
• Our $$ spent per day averaged at $264.22
• Our $$ spent per km averaged at $1.22

Many “grey nomad” travelling websites have a dollar/km spend of $1.00 is a good budget to stick to. I am more than happy with our spend of $1.22

If we had chosen to cook all our meals ourselves we would have spent far less than $1.00. However, even though we enjoy cooking, we enjoy eating at “better” restaurants too. We do not tend to go out for a “Pub style” Meal often, as we are perfectly able to cook that sort of meal ourselves.

What went well…

I was pleased with how we packed the car. We had the Engel fridge on the back seat, along with a smaller car fridge. In the boot were our two suitcases, (plus for the first week a few bags of Christmas Presents)

The car fridge held just Milk, Eggs, Bread and a couple of small bottles of water.
The Engel initially held the food we brought from home and then we kept it topped up with meat, vege, cheese etc along the way. This kept us with 3 days food in the fridge. To make it easier to unpack, all the food was in two eco-shopping bags this meant rather than hauling fridge in and out of the car, we only had to lift out the two bags. The food was going from the car fridge to a kitchen fridge. When we were leaving, we ran the car fridge for a while as we were packing up and the cold food was always the last to pack. This worked well, I had a small fridge thermometer and checked the temp regularly for the first couple of days until we were satisfied that we were not going to put ourselves in any danger of food poisoning 🙂

We packed our two large suitcases a little differently to usual.. In one case I had all our clothes. My clothes on one side and his on the other.

The other suitcase was packed with zip up insulated shopping bags which were packed as follows.

• * “Kitchen” – Pantry goods – Olive Oil, gravy powder, crackers, salt, pepper, tea, coffee, sugar, tomato sauce Also our sharp chef’s knife, good potato peeler, egg flip, tea towels, zip lock bags, baking paper.
• * “Bathroom” – All toiletries, medications, combs, brushes, hair dryer, shavers, toothbrushes and toothpaste. Dishwasher tablets and Laundry powder were also in this bag.
• * “Electrical” – A powerboard with USB outlets, chargers for phones and Ipads., our Apple TV box and HDMI cable
• We also packed our good medium sized non stick frying pan.

This configuration worked pretty well. It was easy to bring in just 2 suitcases. then the small car fridge and the food from the Engel.

I tried to book accommodation that had laundry facilities and was able to wash pretty much every 3rd day without having to pay for laundromats.

What didn’t go well…

Honestly not much. I could have done with an extra pair of socks and we forgot tongs 🙂 We did not bother to buy them along the way though, as most places had them. We did buy a set of flexible cutting boards, as many of the accommodations either did not have a board, or they were tiny or they were stone, so we decided that cutting mats were $5.00 well spent.
I remembered pack swimwear for the Spa Pools at Moree, but forgot beach towels. Luckily we did have an old towel in the car so we did not have to take the white towels from the motel.

Why do we choose AirBnB’s?
Over the years we have always preferred to stay in places where we can self cater as often as possible. Both of us prefer to have a cooked breakfast rather than cereal or toast, so motel accommodation has traditionally not been much of an option for us, as most do not have kitchens.

Apartment/Suite style hotel accommodation is often very expensive or has a minimum nightly stay of 2, 5 or 7days depending on the time of year.

Caravan Park cabins have been a good choice for many years and we have had lots of great holidays in these.

Then…..along came AirBnB 🙂 I admit I was a little cautious the first couple of times I used it, but the more I looked into reviews I became more confident. Now I am happy that it is a safe way to travel.

When I am planning a trip, I know roughly where I need to be staying, so my first stop is always AirBnB. You can search by location, then you use filters to narrow down the choices available. Firstly I always filter by “entire place” this means that we have a place to ourselves, not sharing a room in somebody’s house. Sometimes an “entire place” is a suburban house, sometimes it is a granny flat or unit within the grounds of the host’s house, but always you have the place to yourself with little or no interaction with your host.
My next filter is to find properties with a kitchen, free off-street parking, air conditioning, WiFi and laundry facilities.
This will usually give loads of options so then I will narrow the price range down to $100 per night. ( sometimes I need to raise this to $150 to get more suitable properties.
Then I will compile a list of options to show hubby and we make a decision together.

We have never had any problems with AirBnB. They have always been clean and each host has been lovely.
We have found that, especially in county areas, they are often cleaner and nicer than somewhat overpriced, rundown motels that have had little maintenance for years and are run by burnt-out despondent owners.
Each AirBnB listing has a review section you can read and from I have read, AirBnB does not allow many bad reviews before kicking people out of the programme.

All in all, we have had a lovely holiday in comfortable accommodation with no regrets.