I’ve spent years writing about where to go and what to see once you’re there. What I hardly ever get to write about is the part I love most, which is the driving itself: the days when the driving is the point and your bed comes with you. So here are the two coastal campervan trips I’d fly across the world to do again, both of them facing the same ocean from opposite ends of it. One runs north out of Perth along Western Australia’s Coral Coast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The other runs out of Los Angeles, up the California coast one way and into the desert the other. If you’ve read my destination guides and wondered how you’d actually string those places together without a hotel every night, this is how I’d do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The stretch north from Perth toward Ningaloo Reef is the drive that made me fall for Western Australia: empty highway, wildflowers in spring, turquoise water, and whale sharks you can snorkel with. I’d collect a campervan in Perth<\/a> for this one, because the distances up the Coral Coast are enormous and having your bed and kitchen travelling with you is the only sane way to do it. You’re looking at hundreds of miles between the places worth stopping, with long gaps where there’s no fuel and no hotel for hours, so a self-contained van is what makes the trip possible at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I use Travellers Autobarn, the budget campervan company, at the Perth end. They run a depot in Bellevue, about ten minutes from Perth airport, which makes it easy to land and point the van north the same day. That timing matters more than it sounds, because your first real target, Kalbarri, is a solid day’s drive up, and you don’t want to burn your first afternoon shuttling across the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Give yourself two weeks if you can, because Kalbarri, Shark Bay, Coral Bay and Exmouth each deserve a proper stop rather than a drive-by. Kalbarri gives you the gorges of the national park and that skywalk cantilevered out over the Murchison River. Shark Bay is where I’d slow right down: Monkey Mia for the dolphins in the shallows, and Shell Beach, made of billions of tiny white cockle shells packed metres deep instead of sand. Then Coral Bay, the quiet little sister to Exmouth, where you can wade off the beach and be on living reef within a few strokes. If you push all the way to Exmouth and time it for autumn, you can swim alongside whale sharks, which is the sort of morning you don’t stop thinking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A word on the trade-offs, because I’d rather you knew going in. Spring, from roughly August to October, is the sweet spot: the wildflowers are out across the sandplains and the heat hasn’t arrived yet. Go in the depth of summer and the north gets brutally hot, with flies to match. Fuel and groceries cost noticeably more the further north you get, so I stock up in the bigger towns and never let the tank drop below half. And the driving days are genuinely long, so this suits people who like the road more than anyone hoping to be somewhere new every couple of hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For the American leg I’d start at Travellers Autobarn’s Los Angeles depot<\/a>, which sits over in Inglewood just a short ride from LAX, so you can fly in and have the RV packed before jet lag catches up with you. It’s the same budget company I use in Australia, which is partly why I like bookending a big trip this way: I know what I’m getting at both ends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Los Angeles puts two completely different road trips within reach: north up Highway 1 to Big Sur and the Pacific coast, or east into the desert toward Joshua Tree and Death Valley, then on to the Grand Canyon. Having an RV means you can chase Big Sur’s fog one week and sleep under desert stars the next without ever booking a hotel. If Route 66 is on your list, this is also where that legendary run to Chicago begins, so LA can be the start of something much longer than a loop if you’ve got the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I only had a week, I’d point the RV north first. Highway 1 hugs the cliffs past Malibu and Santa Barbara, then climbs into Big Sur, where the road threads between redwoods and a thousand-foot drop to the surf. Pull in at Julia Pfeiffer Burns for the waterfall that spills straight onto the beach, then keep going to Monterey and, if you can, Point Reyes. The catch is that Big Sur’s parking and campgrounds fill fast in summer, and stretches of Highway 1 have closed for landslides more than once in recent years, so I’d check the road status before I committed to the whole run.<\/p>\n\n\n\n With more time I’d swing back through LA and head the other way, into the desert, which is where an RV really earns its keep. Joshua Tree at night, with no light for miles and the whole sky switched on, is worth rearranging a trip for. Death Valley is the extreme: the lowest and hottest ground in North America, and gorgeous for it, though I wouldn’t take it on between June and September when daytime temperatures turn dangerous and you can’t count on cell service if something goes wrong. From there the Grand Canyon’s South Rim is within reach, and having your own kitchen and bed means you can stay for a sunrise instead of racing back to a motel in the nearest town.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The honest trade-off out west is fuel and size. An RV drinks gas, and American distances are long enough that it adds up. It’s also a big vehicle to thread through Big Sur’s curves or into a crowded trailhead lot, so I book campgrounds ahead in peak season and I don’t try to cover too much ground in a day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’re choosing between them, let the season decide. Western Australia is at its best in our spring, from about August to October, when the wildflowers are out and the north is still bearable. California’s coast is friendliest in late spring and early autumn, when the summer crowds have thinned but the roads are open and the desert hasn’t hit its worst heat. Both trips reward the same instinct, which is to drive less and stay longer. Pick three or four places you actually want to wake up in and give each a couple of nights. Let the van do what a van does best, which is turn the space<\/a> between the postcards into the best part of the trip.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Two oceans and two very different coasts, seen the one way I’d choose over any tour. Wherever you start, fill the tank and pull over whenever the view demands it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve spent years writing about where to go and what to see once you’re there. What I hardly ever get to write about is the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=576"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":582,"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/576\/revisions\/582"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbansfreaks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Los Angeles, the Pacific Coast and the desert by RV<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Which one first<\/h2>\n\n\n\n