Emptying the Land Rover prior to packing it ready for shipping.

Our last full day before we fly out and we needed to get everything prepared for us and the Land Rover for our journeys home.
We needed to sort out what we are going to take home ourselves, in hand luggage and hold luggage, and make sure the process of dropping off the Land Rover at the shipping agents goes as smoothly as possible tomorrow.
We started by emptying nearly everything out of the back of the Land Rover and I emptied all the spares and stuff that we’d put inside the spare tyre on the roof. It’s amazing how much stuff you can fit inside a tyre ! The tyre and roof tent both have to be removed and put on a palette when we get to the agent’s tomorrow.
The roof tent is only held on by four nuts and bolts but the back two are a real pain to get to and can take the best part of an hour to undo as they are underneath the tent and roll cage. As a way to save messing around tomorrow I removed the back two nuts today so only the two front ones need to be undone to get the tent off.
We managed to get everything sorted in the end and as I write this now we’re pretty much ready to go barring the bits we need for the morning. Hopefully there won’t be a heavy dew in the morning as we want the tent as dry as possible when we fold it up.
So tomorrow we head to Botany Bay to drop the Land Rover off, get it ready and sort out the paperwork. We’ll then get a taxi to the airport and begin our journey home. The Land Rover should arrive back in the UK sometime around the end of August when we’ll go and collect it and probably spend a night somewhere on our way home.
It has been an amazing adventure and I hope that it won’t be our last visit to Australia. Once we’ve had time to get back to normal for a while we’ll start planning our next trip, probably a bit closer to home – Scandinavia, Southern Europe, North Africa, Eastern Europe, who knows where we’ll end up on our next adventure. If we come to Australia again it’ll probably be for a much shorter visit so we’ll hire or borrow a vehicle and try and fill in some of the gaps we left in our personal map of the country. Having said that, I have nearly 4000 pictures from this trip to sort through first !