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Travel Through Australia... And Never Leave Georgia!

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This entry was posted on 5/8/2010 9:25 AM and is filed under uncategorized.

This morning, I received a video from fellow YouTube user Geoff Oliver .

In the following video, Geoff takes us from Melbourne, Victoria, to Sydney, New South Wales. See how he drives the 900 km (approximately 550 mile) route in just 5 minutes...




After having watched this video once, I decided to play it back again to see if I could trace the route Geoff took.

With the help of Google Maps, plus the various town names that were provided on the video itself, it looked like he traveled on Route 31 (Hume Highway), part of Australia's National Highway System (NHS). According to the Australian roadgeek website "Oz Roads" , their NHS is a primarliy federal-funded network of highways that link the state capitals and the Australian Capital Territory (Canberra) to one another.

In the State of Victoria, Route 31 apparently signed as either "M31" if it is a "motorway" (limited-access highway) section or "A31" if is a regular primary highway with at-grade crossings. Once it crosses into the State of New South Wales (NSW) near the town of Albury, it retains the same route number, but is apparently signed as a so-called "National Route", thus (IIRC) Hume Highway may be known as "National 31" to NSW residents. (NOTE: If there are any Australians reading this blog, then please feel free to correct me if I am wrong and thank you in advance for doing so.)

As a roadgeek, I find it very interesting that Australia's highway signage is a blend of North American and European signage standards. Austraila tends to use the same font as we do on their green signs, plus they tend to use the same color standards for tourism (brown) and services (blue) as we do here in the States. For several examples of Aussie signs, please check out Rick Wardle's Picasa gallery of signs in the State of Queensland.

Before I die, I would love to go "down under", rent a car, and just "roadtrip" and "roadgeek" Australia to my hearts content. One place that is definitely on my "to drive" list is this iconic Australian structure (image taken from Google Earth)...



Yes, folks, that is the one-and-only Sydney Harbour Bridge.And that, dear readers, is how I traveled through Australia... and never left Georgia.

To learn more about Australia's highways, please visit the "Oz Roads" website. It has a plethora of Aussie road information, history, photos, and even links to other Aussie road-related sites.

That's it for now. Kudos to Geoff on the video, thanks to you for reading, and please come back often.

 

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