Accommodation and Food

Food is expensive in Au restaurants. Junk food like chips or chocolate is very expensive.

We stay in cabins at Vanparks often. You can save a lot by cooking your own meals in the kitchens. For example, last night a Cabin in a Vanpark, only a few blocks from Warrnambool's main street, cost us $88. Getting groceries at our local Coles store (Coles is the big store for food in Australia, it's Neworld Groceries in NZ), we cooked seafood Pad Thai with a half-kg of seafood for about $22 all in. If we ate that at the restaurant, it would have been about $60 to $80 with beer and wine.
Breakfast costs us about $5 to make in our cabins if we have eggs. In the restaurant this would cost about $30 for the 2 of us.

The Caravan Parks, what we call campground in Canada, cost around $30 for 2 to set up a tent. We get use of a kitchen, showers, nice touches compared to wild camping.

We "Wild Camped" just off the road a bit and that's nice as the birds all come to visit in the morning and you do not get the annoying campers that stay up making noise as all they did is sit in their cars all day. Unfortunately Shirley has not found any of the deadly Brown Snakes waiting to greet her at the tent flap in the morning. But she keeps looking.

The best beer in australia is made on the island of Tasmania, to the south of here. We did not tour Tasmania this year. Thank God for that; there have been numerous forest fires for the last month and a half.

We're sticking to the more populated areas for a while. It seems that the small towns in tourist areas do not know how to prepare anything but fish and chips. Also, in the small pubs, everything is deep fried.