Brisbane to Noosa Heads Road Trip Itinerary - Britz

Six nights and 394 kilometres in a loop from Brisbane in a campervan, up the Sunshine Coast and back, in legs of an hour or two.

Bribie Island comes first, a sand island joined to the mainland by a bridge, with calm water on the passage side and surf on the ocean side, and a national park covering much of it.

Maleny follows up in the Blackall Range, where the Glass House Mountains, a line of volcanic plugs named by Cook in 1770, stand in view across the valley, and the hinterland towns trade in cheese, galleries and views. Caloundra and Mooloolaba come next on the coast, the latter with an aquarium and a patrolled beach, and Noosa Heads closes the loop, where the national park on the headland has koalas in the trees and a sequence of small bays below it.

Britz supply the camper and the day-by-day plan, and the hire is priced live per vehicle rather than per person; campsites, fuel, ferries, park fees and activities are all extra, with a nil-excess insurance pack available at booking. Seven days for under four hundred kilometres makes this a sequence of short hops rather than a drive, which suits a family or a first camper hire. Everything is sealed and nothing is more than two hours from Brisbane. Noosa campsites book out a long way ahead in the Queensland school holidays, so the dates matter rather more than the route. The hinterland leg up to Maleny is the part visitors skip and should not: it is several degrees cooler than the coast, green rather than sandy, and twenty minutes from the beach.