One 12-Year-Old’s 800-Mile Drive Across Australia<br />AUSTRALIA Kendall Broken Hill Perth NEW SOUTH WALES Great Australian Bight Canberra Melbourne Indian Ocean 500<br />Miles AUSTRALIA Kendall Broken Hill NEW SOUTH WALES Canberra Melbourne Indian Ocean 500 Miles APRIL 24, 2017<br />How far is that?<br />The distance traveled doesn’t look like much on a map, particularly given Australia’s size, but the 800 miles<br />that he drove — again, alone, as a 12-year-old — is about the equivalent of making the long and annoying drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles, back and forth, with a few dozen more miles thrown in for rest stops and food.<br />Well, just try to compete with this: Police officers near the Australian mining town of Broken Hill stopped a sport utility vehicle Saturday<br />that was being driven by a 12-year-old boy who had been on the road in the middle of nowhere, driving alone, for 800 miles.<br />And while it’s common for young people in Australia<br />and all over the world to drive tractors or other vehicles at young ages, this boy managed to drive on major roads for an entire day without being found out or being harmed.<br />The police said the boy had clear and specific plans,<br />but to complete his intended journey, he would have had to drive through the Nullarbor Plain, a flat, desolate, hot and largely empty stretch in the south that is about four times the size of Belgium.<br />The police said the boy, who has not been identified, took the family car<br />and started driving on Friday from his home in Kendall, a small town about 220 miles northeast of Sydney.
