We’re 1 month out from our trip to Discover Tasmania! We’re locking down our plans, and share in the video above what we have on the list. It’s going to be a big 11 days and 10 nights touring Tasmania as a family.
We’re going to be staying predominantly in cabins (at parks and on the Spirit of Tasmania), a number of nights at various Discovery Parks as well as the odd Rainforest retreat and Beachhouse. That’s why we are calling this trip Tasmania by Cabin & Car.
We’ve taken advice from others who have been there, online blogs and families just like us (thanks Caravanning with Kids!). Oh, and the good old internet. Tasmania has a lot of great resources online for family travellers like us.
To start the planning process, we did some brainstorming. This is a great way to start planing for any trip. What would you like to see and what would you like to do? We’re fortunate that in Justin’s home office we have both a projector and whiteboard, which worked out to be perfect for getting the initial ideas down:
Getting a map out and jotting down locations of things really starts to paint a picture. Even a printout of Google Maps on an A4 page works wonders. Focus on the must do’s or must see’s for you and your family.
Once you have your big ticket items, it’s time to think about your family travel budget. Not only what you plan to spend, but also the amount of time you plan to spend at each location or family activity.
We’ve decided on 11 days and 10 nights, hence we had to drop off some items that geographically were just too hard to get to in Tasmania in a reasonable time frame. Literally – join the dots! Work out a plan, use tools like Google Maps to work out travel times and you will quickly start to see an itinerary that works. For our trip we will have a total of 20 hours driving time in Tasmania, which works out to be just under 2 hours a day. It’s a road trip for us, so we’re ok with that. We will be fitting in a lot as you can see in the video above!
Once you have the travel identified, and some timing, you can start to think about costs. Specifically, how much you can afford to spend? You need to take into account accommodation, fuel, food and restaurants and tickets or admission prices. These can quickly add up. There were many things we would have loved to do, but with a family of 5 some things just don’t work out economically.
Check out the video on what we have on our itinerary so far. We’ve nearly got it all locked down, and are starting to make bookings for our family accommodation. As mentioned we will predominantly be staying in Cabins, and travelling by car. It’s going to be quite the adventure!