Here’s a brief and somewhat inadequate summary of the amazing year of travel that Julie and I have just completed.

One of the great joys of overland travel is meeting not just the locals but also fellow travellers, those who have a similar outlook on long distance travel over a period of many months – or in most cases, many years. Our Follow the Sun plan was to travel for about three years which is actually a fairly short period to cover as much ground as we wanted. But we also needed to juggle other important priorities such as family (especially the arrival of grandchildren!) and friends back in Australia. And so our slow travel wasn’t nearly as slow as other overlanders, of which some had turned slow travel into a full time lifestyle. Oh well, we committed to see as much as we could in our ‘limited’ timeline and so far have had no regrets.

But you can cover a lot of ground in a year at a medium pace and every day is full of adventure, discovery, learning and (usually) pleasant surprises. One achievement that we thought was pretty cool was completing the drive from Prudhoe Bay on the Arctic Circle in northern Alaska, which we hit in August 2017, to Tierra del Fuego, the end of the road on the southern tip of South America which we made April 2018.

Our highlights for the year? Way too complicated to choose one single place or moment, so many to choose from, such varying criteria depending on our mood and memories. But here’s a few that rate highly:

Julie and I would often end the day talking about the little surprises that make travel so enjoyable and rewarding. Many times each day we would see something that we didn’t expect, didn’t know anything about or didn’t understand. We were constantly shaking our heads in amazement at what this wonderful world has to offer.