Pre Travel Preparations

We had a lot of preparation to do in a short period of time.
Firstly the house. To be able to afford the trip we had to rent out our house, and that meant fixing the worst of it's problems and finding tenants. Luckily Judy who also has an office at resource 88 needed a place over part of the time we were away, and by some miracle Maggie, through sabbatical homes, found a family to rent the house for all the weeks that Judy wouldn't need it. Talk about serendipity! So we scraped and painted the bathroom, replaced the toilet, replaced the kitchen cupboard doors, and generally made the place presentable. Finally, I wrote a house manual including amongst other things, an explanation about the risks (small as they are) of drinking rainwater, and how to maintain the rainwater harvesting system if they had the inclination.
Then there was choosing and buying a vehicle. We chose a 95 diesel manual landcruiser wagon for their space and reliability. I knew we would be traveling very slowly up the hills, but there aren't that many hills in Australia.
We bought a second-hand off-road camper trailer to minimise the time spent making and breaking camp. It's built like a brick outhouse and weighs almost a ton without our gear, but should go just about anywhere.
We wrote to the department of education to get permission to take the kids out of school, took Cyprus our dog, to stay with my brother in Canberra, upgraded our NRMA roadside assistance, got Millie's orthodontics started, redirected mail, wrote a draft itinerary (for the DOE)
I finished any jobs I could, bought a laptop which could handle all the work software I needed to run, bought a wireless modem, an antenna and cradle for the phone, an antenna for the modem, fixed up the dual battery system, bought power supplies and power splitters to run  everything off the car, bought a solar panel to charge the second battery. I got VPN access set up to my office computer and copied all the documents and contacts from that computer to a new potable hard drive.

Fabian had a farewell party with his friends, we had farewell dinners with neighbours and with with school friend parents.
After some deliberation, I bought a new portable compressor fridge, 4WD recovery equipments...Ozi Explorer GPS mapping software and maps for Australia....
If we hadn't run out of time, I might have run us broke. But, after a poor night's sleep during which I thought up a long list of things to pack, which luckily I managed to remember none of, we headed off for ... Redfern.