The route begins in earnest on the Warrego Highway, climbing the Great Dividing Range to Toowoomba before dropping onto the Darling Downs at Dalby. From there it threads southwest through St George and Cunnamulla on a sequence of highways and developmental roads, each leg longer and lonelier than the last. The numbers tell the story of a country thinning out beneath you. Brisbane to Toowoomba is a quick 127 kilometres of busy highway. By the far end, Thargomindah to Innamincka is a single 396-kilometre haul with almost nothing in between. The towns grow smaller and further apart, the traffic dwindles to the occasional road train, and the horizon flattens until the sky takes up most of the windscreen.

Beyond Cunnamulla the road enters the Channel Country, a land of braided rivers, gibber plains and floodplains that turn briefly emerald after rain. Thargomindah, once home to one of the first hydroelectric street-lighting systems in the southern hemisphere, marks the last real town before the border. Past it lies Noccundra, with its lone sandstone hotel beside the Wilson River waterhole, and the historic cattle runs of the Cooper Basin. This is country the early explorers struggled to cross and pastoralists later prized for its permanent waterholes. The Adventure Way lets a modern traveller pass through in air-conditioned comfort what once cost expeditions their lives.

The route's destination is Innamincka and the Cooper Creek country, ground soaked in the memory of the Burke and Wills expedition. It was near here, in 1861, that the explorers died of starvation after missing their relief party by hours, and the lone coolabah known as the Dig Tree still stands as a marker of that disaster. In Queensland the road is sealed and forgiving; cross into South Australia and the surface turns to dirt, the route continuing as the Strzelecki Track toward Adelaide. The change underfoot is abrupt and deliberate, the moment the touring drive becomes a genuine outback crossing.

Long before any highway, this corridor was Aboriginal country, crossed by trading and travelling routes that the explorers themselves often followed. The Kullilli people, traditional owners of the Bulloo and Wilson River lands around Thargomindah, walked these floodplains for thousands of years. Many were forcibly removed from their country between the 1880s and the 1960s; in 2014 the Federal Court formally recognised their native title over some 29,600 square kilometres of the south-west, and in recent years they have returned, buying back land that was always theirs. The Adventure Way runs straight through that living history. It is a tourist drive laid over a much deeper map.