We can’t do this… Can we?

I can almost guarantee that there is not one family on the road, who casually strutted into this lifestyle with little to no worries about whether it was the right thing to do.

Just to give you some background on us, we were a pretty average family in the inner western suburbs of Adelaide. Our kids were in a great school, they had friends, good grades and enjoyed all the usual extra curricula activities. Brad had a great job.. I enjoyed hosting international students and enjoyed volunteering at my kids school. We have an amazing church family that we are apart of. Life at home was good…. but it was hectic.

We had a wonderful school community at home, it was hard for us all to leave it behind to go on this adventure..

I was always so busy, and time was going way too quick. In my endeavour to slow it down, nothing really worked.

What bothered me the most was the stage of life we are currently in and how precious these years are while my kids are little and being acutely aware as to how fast they grow up…. I mean people tell us parents this all the time, don’t they?

We also really wanted to travel and explore with our kids, and 4 weeks a year wasn’t really enough time to see and do what we wanted to see.

When we made the decision to actually do it, to travel Australia, our plan was to buy a caravan with the equity we have in our home. However, due to the new financial times we find ourselves in, unfortunately we couldn’t access any of this money.

Thankfully our very generous parents said that they would lend us their caravan for a year so we could savour this time and make memories with our children while they are young.

The caravan and 4X4 my parents have let us use to travel around Australia

We were so fortunate and appreciative to my parents, and although we had the desire and now the means to take off on our adventure, there was still so much to do to get ourselves ready.

Can we pull this off? Is it the right thing to do? Do we really want to do it? or is it just a novel idea that will fizzle out and we will regret later on?

its not easy to pull your kids out of school, (a great School at that), commit to home-schooling them for a year, resign from stable full-time employment, rent your home out…. I mean what if we don’t like it?, where will we live? will we get work on the road? will we get enough work on the road?

There was a lot of cold sweats and panicky nights for me, at two in the morning, Wondering if it is the right thing to do. If we were meant to be going at all…

On top of all that, We didn’t know anyone else, personally who had done something like this, we had only read about them and followed them on social media.

There were lots of challenges that cropped up and a lot of second guessing if it was the right thing, but once we had our vision, we put in a lot of hard work, and eventually it did all come together. and we took off on our trip on 13th February 2024.

It was a wild ride to get on the road, especially since we had 4 children, one of them a new-born and a cohort of international students, in the lead up. But where we are now I can say without a shadow of a doubt it is the BEST decision we have ever made!

We are loving every minute. I hope you feel inspired and encouraged by our journey and enjoy reading about all our adventures.

one of our beautiful newborn photos taken by the very talented @natashameganphotography.