Dating apps weren't working for me, so I went on a first date road trip that lasted two weeks

There are a few different reactions you get when you tell people you’re going on a first date road trip with someone you haven’t actually met in real life. Concerned, raised eyebrows, double takes, and the occasional ‘omg that sounds fun but TERRIFYING’. It’s not necessarily a concept I ever imagined myself engaging in, but life works out in mysterious ways and what started as an offhand joke many months ago suddenly became real as October crept up on me – I was about to explore Far North Queensland with a man I had technically never met before.

It was almost a MAFS-like experiment, minus the fake marriage part. It wasn't lost on me I've spent 10 years of my life recapping reality dating TV shows and had now found myself on my own quest to figure out if love was blind, just like that other Netflix show I've religiously watched every season of.

So can you fall in love with a stranger you met online in the space of a few weeks? Call it smart or stupid, but there was only one way to find out.

A blind first date with a twist

We met on Bumble in October 2023, and while we didn’t meet up during his travels in Australia, we stayed in touch. A series of bad dates later (me) and a relationship breakdown (him) we started discussing meeting up albeit in a very light-hearted way. Not long after, he found cheap flights to Australia and I found myself in desperate need of a holiday. With timing on our side, we decided, f**k it. Why not? The best case scenario is we could really hit it off and fall in love, or the worst case scenario was… well, we'd have the worst time of our lives and both waste our annual leave.

Even though I am actually a chronic overthinker I am also, for some weird reason, someone who often makes very spur-of-the-moment decisions – from sticking my leg through a tattoo glory hole with very little thought, to methodically saving up thousands of dollars in the 2010s to move overseas before pulling the pin just months prior for absolutely no good reason... but then, thankfully, narrowly missing spending the COVID years in lockdown in London.

So minus the horrendous tattoo, my gut feelings haven’t often led me astray, though my dating choices often have. But when concerned friends started adding me on ‘Find My Friends’ before my trip, I was the only one who wasn’t that stressed about road-tripping with a man from a dating app. I was more concerned about the fact I was going to be behind the wheel of a car for the first time in seven years.

What happens with you go on a road trip first date?

Just like any good tour guide, I met him at Sydney Airport with a tacky balloon. He came fresh from the plane with a blow-up engagement ring. After laughing at how hilarious we both were, there wasn’t much time to waste.

We hired a cheap car (my favourite car hire app to use these days now that I’m hooning on the roads again is Turo, where you can pick a car up from your neighbourhood on a cheap daily rate and zoom around to your heart’s content – I ended up using it twice during this trip!) and headed down on a trip to NSW’s South Coast, a place I spent many of my formative years in my early twenties. From Ulladulla’s best pies to Kiama’s blowhole and Wollongong bar crawls, we transitioned very smoothly from FaceTime chats to IRL banter. I didn’t kill him on the roads, and he calmly gave me instructions every time I had to reverse park. There was no denying we made a great team – but was there actually a spark?

Heading to the places where I was comfortable and him meeting my friends on a couple of nights out was fun, but it wasn’t screaming love for either of us. So it was time to make the trip more drastic – it was time to step right out of our comfort zones.

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Fate or just mates?

Cairns is a special place for me, which is not often something you hear from someone. I first went on a work trip back in 2017, fresh from a Very Bad Breakup, where I got off the plane into the December heat and finally felt the knots in my stomach loosen and my shoulders drop for the first time in months. It could have been heat exhaustion, but the region was another magical world to me at the time – from jumping into the ocean on reef tours, exploring the beauty of the Daintree, and listening to the calming sound of the water bubbling over the rocks at Mossman Gorge.

I’ve always travelled north of Cairns (with this trip being my fourth time since 2017) but this time it was time to shake it up. I was not about to take my new bestie on a honeymooner’s holiday to Port Douglas. We were there to adventure, starting from Cairns and going down south to the hidden beauty of Mission Beach.

On the South Coast, we had stayed at an accommodation on a road titled Slaughterhouse Road. Our first stop on our Cairns to Mission Beach itinerary was a tropical winery called Murdering Point Winery. I was starting to think the universe was throwing us some fairly obvious signs that this trip wasn't going to end in a real proposal and hopefully, we were both just going to make it out alive.

We also had activities teed up for our stay at Mission Beach which I started to think was also a sign of things to come. I kept calling our visit to Dunked Island, 'Dumped Island'. On one of our dinners at the idyllic romantic venue of Castaways Resort, we discussed his latest Instagram thirst trap of our day snorkelling the reef. The writing was in the sand.... while we were getting along, we were not falling in love (but, you know, maybe our reef thirst traps would help us find future partners).

Can you fall in love on a two-week road trip?

On our trip south of Cairns we had many adventures and met so many amazing friendly people who helped us out with local knowledge – of the best water holes to swim in, the best pub food, and the best places to swim to catch the wonder of the reef which remains more untouched than what you see up north.

We cuddled Koalas in Cairns at the new Cairns Koalas & Creatures, laughed at each other attempting to peel prawns the right way as we dined on an actual boat at Prawnstar, did tequila shots at an Irish bar while I taught him the joys of Shannon Noll's chokehold on Aussie pub dance floors with his hit song 'What About Me?' and lived like honeymooners at Crystalbrook's amazing Flynn hotel, eating a tub of lollies and watching the sun rise over the Coral Sea.

The realities of the longest first date isn't the love-fest you see on TV

Of course when you do something this kinda level of crazy, your friends, coworkers, and family become a little bit invested in a) your safety and wellbeing and b) well, if you've actually fallen in love or not.

We travelled well together, we belted out Maroon 5's Songs About Jane, and we went and found out our future at the Cairns Night Markets, visiting the psychic who has been set up there every time I've visited the region.

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As we debriefed over noodles, he talked about how the psychic told him he'd meet someone at a wedding. I talked about how the psychic told me I had three potential suitors in my future that I'd have to choose between (which, to be honest, sounds exhausting). We both laughed at each other's fate, while also knowing our own — while it had started as a dating app connection, we'd formed a weirdly beautiful friendship instead.

In the "real-life" dating world it was unlikely that we would have made it past two or three dates compatibility-wise. But the interesting part of spending that much time with someone back-to-back is you're forced to really open up your communication, work on your conflict resolution styles, and be upfront about feelings and where you're at, and it becomes a lot easier to detach your ego, which can often rear its head in anxious or avoidant ways in the modern dating world.

On my road trip I had no choice but to be my authentic self — including all of the parts of myself I usually want to hide. Whether it was insecurities around when my PCOS flares up my skin (which it did smack-bang in the middle of this trip — to all my other hormonal acne girlies, I cannot recommend Lust Minerals foundation if you want coverage while on holidays!) to recognising and verbalising my own needs and feelings, which is something I haven't always been great at doing. By being in this wild experiment and having to navigate things as openly and honestly as we could, it was a more valuable dating lesson to me than anything else I've experienced in the last couple of years.

Enough from you, what about him?

It'd be redundant of me to end this article without getting words from the man himself. Did we fall in love? Was there ever a chance? What does he think about me now? Has he ghosted me for good? So I asked him...

"It was one of the best experiences of my life," he said. "It felt natural throughout which I think is pretty rare when you meet someone for the first time. I [felt a] mixture of emotions going home. I think the outcome may have been different if the time together was spread out, as being in each other's space for such a long period of time can be intense. But I think you'll be etched in my memory alongside the koala as 'things I love in Australia'."

We may not have got our Longest Third Date-style story or Netflix documentary, but what we did get was a great story of a very random friendship.

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