Our dream shapes into reality.

Caption: It’s all coming together—all going well, it won’t be long before we’re travelling the Country…and we’ll have our own little joey in the pouch!

Well what do you bloody know, we have a contract on the house! It is, of course, very early days and so we’re trying hard, I mean really hard, not to get too excited as we’ve had a contract fall through previously, but geez it’s difficult. We’d love nothing more than to celebrate, but yet again those damn words, “a deal isn’t done until it’s done” are ringing like an earworm, reminding us to not get carried away with ourselves too much. Obviously, there’s nothing we can do to ensure it all goes ahead, so we’ll take each step as it comes and keep fingers, toes, and whatever else can be crossed, crossed, and just hope that everything runs its course with a good outcome.

It isn’t the offer we’d hoped for, being even less than the previous contract, but with interest rates continuing their steady climb upwards, the market is continuing to trend downward in turn. We had a few lowball offers that the agent didn’t officially present to us as they were outlandishly off the mark and, to be frank, a little offensive. But, as I’ve said before, things are only worth what someone is willing to pay. It will be a 60-day settlement, which is great for us as it provides a decent period of time to get ourselves organised—one would think. But it does come subject to sale of the buyer’s property, though, which is less than ideal, but we do have a sunset clause on the contract which does provide some kind of reassurance for us, namely, that if we receive an offer from another buyer, the current buyers have a couple of days to go unconditional and commit to the sale or forgo their offer, allowing us to accept the offer from the new buyers. With that mouthful of a sentence said though, it’s all been very quiet, with no other serious offers having been presented to us as yet—it looks like this is our best bet in selling the house.

For now though, it’s just business as usual—Alicia is working hard on her podcast, Cuppa with a Doula (check it out on Spotify, YouTube etc), squeezing in recording time as she is able, along with putting in a lot of time editing episodes, and I’m continuing to work. With this adventure looming and coming ever closer to fruition, we’ve realised, though, that we haven’t even begun to put any kind of travel plan together—maybe we’ve taken this “not having a plan or end date” concept a bit far. The 7-week house-sit that Alicia found in New South wales is looking like a strong possibility, and so it looks like we may at least know which direction we’ll be heading and can begin putting some ideas together around where we go from there. We really enjoy more of an inland, high-country kind of vibe—Stanthorpe, in Southern inland Queensland, has been our go-to winter escape for a couple of years now, and so we think that the region that the house-sit is situated will be the perfect start for us. It’s also reasonably close to Dubbo and we’re keen on a visit to the Western Plains zoo. I’m not a big fan of zoo’s, to be honest—animals stuck in cages, pacing back and forth isn’t a fun experience. Dubbo zoo seems to be a little different to some extent as the enclosures appear to be, dare I say, a little more natural in their design.

Anyway, who knows, but from there maybe we’d plan to make our north again and travel up the Queensland coast, back to the warmer weather. We’re also expecting another travelling companion to join us toward the end of September, and with Alicia keen to birth again in Beaudesert, near where we live and where Alina was born, we’ll make our way back down to south-east Queensland. So, short-term at least, it does look like we might end up having a bit of a plan in place after all. Being inexperienced in caravanning and towing heavy weight, it will be important that we take our time and put short-term plans in place in order to facilitate that. There you go, from that we’ve now got a bit of planning to do which will fan the flames of excitement and, who knows, we might even have some interesting updates for next time.