Two days up the coast, sleeping above it.

Point the car north, string together the best headlands on the east coast, and sleep somewhere with a view. The hard part is choosing where to wake up.

Start on the Tweed coast at Fingal Head, where a causeway of basalt columns runs out toward Cook Island, then drift south through Cabarita and Hastings Point. Swap the coast for the hills on the Northern Rivers Rail Trail, twenty-four kilometres of old railway from Murwillumbah to Crabbes Creek that rolls past sixteen heritage bridges and straight through the 524-metre Burringbar tunnel, glow worms and all. Finish at Cape Byron, where a 3.7-kilometre loop climbs to the 1901 lighthouse on the most easterly point of the mainland, with whales offshore from winter into spring.

The catch is that doing it properly costs more than the trip. A rooftop tent is the better part of three grand, then there are the bikes and an esky worth the name. So do not buy any of it. Hire a rooftop tent already bolted to a rack, throw two e-bikes on for the rail trail, and pack an esky big enough for the weekend. One local sorts the lot in a single booking, and all you have to choose is where to wake up.

This is where buying really bites. A hardshell rooftop tent is the better part of three grand and needs roof bars rated to carry it, two e-bikes are several thousand more with a service bill on top, and a touring esky worth the name is hundreds again. It is a five-figure garage of gear for a few weekends a year, quietly losing value between trips.

Hire it and the sums flip. The rooftop tent comes already bolted to a rack and folds out in under a minute, so there is no ladder-and-canvas wrestling match at dusk. The e-bikes turn the twenty-four kilometre rail trail and its long tunnel into a cruise instead of a slog. Pack it all into one booking from one local, and you pay for the weekend you use, not the eleven months it would otherwise sit still.