Problems, solutions, and planning.

First world problem, having a home and being unhappy.

We’ve asked ourselves time and again—is upending our life as we know it really what we want to do. To be at least a little more certain, I suppose the smart thing to do would be to dig into why we would even consider such a venture, and also begin to map out what it is we hope to achieve.

First of all, what’s the problem? Well, there’s no serious issue we’re facing—we’re doing quite well. We’ve welcomed a beautiful baby girl into the World who’s just perfect. We don’t have the best of anything, nor the worst. We have a great home. It’s quite spacious—it’s no executive home, not that we want that, but there’s plenty of space for us inside, at around 200 square meters, and more than enough space outside, with 1 ¼ acres of land. Alicia and I are both Exercise Physiologists—I currently work 4 days a week, having dropping a day a week to allow more time to work on some business projects, while Alicia, having dropped back to 2 days a week for the same reason, has since extended her maternity leave. And while things are far more exciting these days with the new addition to the family, our life has been one of comfort and repetition. By comfort, we don’t mean living a life of luxury and leisure—far from it. Comfort in that we have typically made safe, middle of the road choices. We work through the week, and come the weekend, we work on our business, endlessly trying to get something off the ground, maybe go out for coffee or lunch somewhere. But otherwise, there’s not much going on.

So, if that’s the, dare I say, problem, what’s the solution, what’s the aspiration? Our shared dream is to travel Australia and explore as much as we can, taking our time to discover places we’ve never seen, and with no fixed end date. That might be 12 months, it might be 5 years. We plan on having at least one more child, likely whilst we are on the road, and therefore, in 5 years the older one will be nearing school age. At that point, should we stick it out for 5 years, we’ll decide whether we call an end to our adventure, or if we continue on and home school. This part we’re not stressing about, at all. That’s quite a way off and we don’t think the decision needs to be a stressful one. Yet.

Because we’re not choosing to do the lap of Australia, that leaves us open to plenty of options. Doing a lap, particularly within a specific timeframe, requires thinking about timing and which direction we’d head, clockwise or anticlockwise, and would also likely see us being guided by the seasons and weather. The latter being factors to consider regardless, I suppose. We will need to come up with a plan, though, otherwise we’ll be aimlessly zigzagging around the country, or perhaps not really getting anywhere at all. Although, maybe that’s a plan within itself? To this point, we’re not even sure about which direction we’ll head. I imagine that might be determined by when we will be ready to depart—summer heat in Australia can be sweltering in every State, but with that said, it wouldn’t be the best idea to head toward the northern parts of the Country during the peak of summer. And then, of course, we need to consider the wet season.

In any case, I think beginning to plan out our adventure will be exciting, to say the least. We are probably going to be in the tricky situation of not being able to give our set up a shakeout test before we officially head off. That might mean that, for a week or two, we aren’t wandering too far away from caravan service centres where we can have adjustments, corrections, and, hopefully only minor, fixes or repairs made to the set up. Alicia and I are generally in agreement about most things, so I doubt we’ll be butting heads when it comes to drafting up our road trip and putting it all together. So, there is plenty more to talk about before we get close to putting a plan together—the house, a tow vehicle, financing the trip, income whilst on the road, planning for more kids…whilst on the road, and more. Here’s to keeping the dream alive—we’ll catch you soon.