The plan was a whirl-wind tour of Outback Australia - to cover a lot of ground without stopping in any one place for too long. We also wanted to spend our time off-road and see the real Outback.

So, way back in 1999, we sat down and listed the Outback destinations that we wanted to see and then joined the dots to create a trip we could do in the time we had available.

In the end, this is the path we took:

The trip we completed (above) wasn't quite what we had planned as bad weather led to some road closures which meant some unexpected changes in course. (We will give our original, intended itinerary in a future update.) We wanted to cover more ground than we did, but this was still a very long, sometimes tough, but incredibly rewarding journey.

The Black line represents our route - we travelled in an anti-clockwise direction around Australia. The numbered towns in blue are the places where we stayed overnight, while the smaller, unnumbered blue text represents points of note. The red text lists the states of Australia.

In the updates we've got planned for our website, we will be covering the sections between our overnight stops (the "stages" of our trip) in detail.