Slow travel: why rushing the Big Lap is the biggest mistake you can make

The bloke at the servo in Longreach looked at my atlas — yes, an actual paper atlas, Denise won't let me throw it out — and said we must've been in a hurry to get somewhere. I told him we'd been on the road for four months and weren't due anywhere in particular until Christmas. He laughed and said that sounded like hard work.

That stuck with me. Because in those early months, it was hard work. We were covering ground like we owed someone money. Cloncurry to Mount Isa in a morning, then pushing on to Camooweal before dark because the map looked so empty and we figured we'd better keep moving. We were ticking off towns like a grocery list.

Six years later, the atlas is held together with a rubber band and I reckon we've finally figured it out. Slow travel isn't a philosophy. It's just common sense once you've burned yourself by going too fast.

What rushing actually costs you

There's a version of the Big Lap that a lot of people do — and I understand why — where the route becomes the goal. You want to say you did it. You want the sticker for the back window. Fair enough. But covering 25,000 kilometres in five months means you're averaging over 160 kilometres of actual driving every single day the van is moving, and that doesn't account for unhitch days, service stops or the inevitable afternoon when one of you feels crook and you don't go anywhere.

I've written before about how long the Big Lap realistically takes — if you haven't had a look at our guide on that question, it's worth a read before you commit to a departure date. The short version is: most people underestimate by at least a third.

But the cost isn't just physical tiredness. It's the places you drive past. Denise still talks about the time we blew through Birdsville on a tight schedule and barely stopped. We've since gone back and spent four nights at Birdsville Caravan Park, walked out to the dunes at sunset, had a long lunch at the Birdsville Hotel, and talked to a drover who'd just come up from the Birdsville Track. That second visit is what we remember. The first one is just a fuel receipt.

The three-night rule and why it actually works

Someone at a camp in the Flinders Ranges told us about the three-night rule and it changed how we travel. The idea is simple: wherever you stop, commit to at least three nights before you decide to move on. First night, you're still mentally driving. Second night, you start to see the place. Third night, you actually belong there a little bit — you've found the good spot for a morning walk, you've chatted to the neighbours, you know which direction the afternoon wind comes from.

We tested it properly at Wilpena Pound in the Ikara–Flinders Ranges. We'd planned two nights. By night two we booked two more. Did the Wangara Lookout walk twice because the light was different in the morning. Denise found a birdwatching group going out before dawn. I read half a novel. Nobody was rushing anywhere.

Three nights is a minimum, not a formula. Some places earn a week. Some places you'll know by noon on day one aren't worth a second night, and that's fine too — you haven't lost anything by giving it the chance.

How to plan a slow trip without losing structure entirely

I'll be honest: pure winging it stressed Denise out in year one, and she was right to be stressed. If you have no structure at all, you end up making decisions at 3pm when you're already tired and the campgrounds are filling up. That's how you end up somewhere average when something great was forty kilometres off the route.

What works for us is loose anchors. Pick six to eight places across the country that you genuinely want to spend time in, and book those in advance — nothing else. Everything between them is flexible. You might hear about a gorge from the couple in the next bay and spend two days there. You might get stuck behind roadworks and end up overnighting somewhere you'd never planned. That's fine. The anchors keep you moving in roughly the right direction without chaining you to a daily schedule.

This is especially useful if you're thinking through which direction to do the lap — your anchors will often tell you which way makes more sense. Chase the good weather, not the map.

The slow travel mindset and your budget

Here's the thing nobody tells you: going slower is cheaper. Not in campsite fees — you'll spend about the same or a bit more, because three nights adds up — but in fuel, in wear on the rig, and in the random expenditure that happens when you're bored and moving. When we were rushing, we spent money at petrol stations, we ate takeaway because we arrived somewhere too late to cook, we bought stuff we didn't need because we had an hour to kill in a town we weren't interested in.

When we slow down, we cook. We use the camp kitchen. We find the local fruit stall instead of the supermarket. A week in one spot with a good free camp nearby costs almost nothing in site fees if you plan it right, and your diesel use drops sharply when you're not grinding out highway kilometres every second day.

The full picture on what a lap costs is worth reading if you're in the planning stage — our breakdown of real Big Lap costs goes into the numbers properly. Slow travel won't blow the budget. It usually saves it.

Finding your people — and why that takes time

This is the one I didn't expect. One of the best parts of long-term travel, for us, has been the people we've met. But friendships on the road take longer than a one-night stopover. You need overlap. You need to run into the same couple twice, or share a camp for three days, or end up at the same pub quiz in a town neither of you expected to like.

We've got mates now we see every year somewhere out west. A retired schoolteacher from Ballarat and her husband who does watercolours. Another couple from the Tablelands who travel with a small dog and too many fishing rods. You don't meet those people when you're packed up by eight and gone before they've finished breakfast.

The grey nomad community gets a bit of stick sometimes — the convoys of matching white vans, the Facebook groups debating dump point etiquette. But honestly, the community is one of the underrated parts of this life. Slow down enough to be in it, not just passing through it.

When slow travel is hard — and what to do about it

There are times when slowing down feels impossible. Big distances are real. The Savannah Way from Cairns to Broome has stretches where you have to cover ground because there's genuinely nothing for a couple of hundred kilometres, or because the wet season is ticking closer and you don't want to be stuck. That's not rushing. That's logistics.

The trick is to know the difference. Rushing because the road demands it is fine. Rushing out of habit, because you feel guilty sitting still, because you've got a vague sense that you should be seeing more things — that's the one to watch. Denise had to tell me three times in our first year to put the atlas away. I was planning the next leg before we'd unpacked the current one. It's a hard habit to break when you've spent forty years with a to-do list.

The short version is: if you're tired at the end of a travel day and you can't remember what you saw last Tuesday, you're probably going too fast.

What you actually remember

I've been writing these pieces for a while now and I keep coming back to the same observation. Nobody tells stories about the days they drove eight hours. They tell stories about the afternoon they got stuck talking to a ringer in a pub in Normanton, or the morning the fog sat low over the ranges and they almost didn't bother getting out of bed but they did, and it was worth it. Those moments don't happen on the highway at 100 km/h with the next waypoint locked in the GPS.

The lap is long. Australia is genuinely big, in a way that doesn't quite sink in until you've driven it. That size is the point. Give it the time it deserves.

— Trev Sanders, Grey Nomad Correspondent