How to move interstate with 3 kids, 2 dogs and 3 cars.
Firstly, unless your kids are of driving age, you'll need to either sell the extra car, or store it with friends until you can return to fetch it later. Check. We have a farm in western qld where we can store all the things. We drove down in 2 cars, and a trailer. I've realised now i'm mixing up my memories, when we left Sydney in 2019 we had 3 teenagers, 1 dog, 1 cat and 3 cars, but that's a story for later on.
We got one of those pack your own pods, and at the time there was only one choice, PODS (an American company operating in Australia). Not all companies will travel to SA we discovered. The east coast is fine, normal, acceptable. When you mention Adelaide so many people scratch their head, like I've said "Mars". This is very odd, and to quote on my husband's favourite expressions: "it's all the same island".
We booked 1, then another, and then a 3rd. Were I to do this again (and I have) I would be able to condense this down. I've learned a lot in the past decade (as one should) and some of my life skills included: packing, moving, moving interstate, moving animals, moving with kids.... etc.
Packing your own POD is the only way to go, IMHO. Unless you don't have the space for it I guess, or are made of money. Even then, like a first class ticket, I just cringe at the idea of paying for something like that. We were able to take our time, firstly packing away all the things we didn't need everyday (hint: this stuff you probably don't need at all!). We packed up our winter clothes ("winter" being a cute idea in Qld) and cut to me in October, breaking into our POD to find our winter clothes boxes, because October in the Adelaide Hills is still very chilly.
We are seasoned road trippers so we were able to do the trip in 3 days. This involved getting up at the crack of dawn (that's pretty early for Qld!), and heading for Sydney, where we overnighted at friend's place (yes, they have space to accommodate 5 of us, plus 3 dogs). We found a humble airbnb that allowed pets somewhere in rural NSW for Day 2 and by Day 3 we had arrived in SA.
We kept a steady pace, only stopping for wee breaks for the kids and dogs. We made a fun rule that the girls could go into the servo and choose anything they wanted, but they had to be ready at the counter with their item by the time dad came in to pay, this kept things moving along at a brisk pace and actually was kind of fun for the kids. They even would plan ahead in case someone needed to use the toilets, sending in one to fetch the goodies (ice cream, chips, chocolate usually, my girls had been trained to not be in to sweet drinks "waste of money" I always would say. Even today they all will drink water on a road trip); and so we worked together as a family and made it to SA without incident.
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