Kristen and I had always spoken about doing our trip around the block when the children were a little older say in 2014, well at least that is what we are factored into our financial plan. For those of you who don’t know us, both Kristen and I both come from the financial services sector so have no idea what we are doing when it comes to travelling around Australia in a 4wd and a small off road pop top trailer but have never been afraid to try things. It seems for most people a journey like this is something that people have dreamed and thought about for a long period of time before venturing out, well not so in our case! In the second half of 2008 we started to talk about doing our trip before the children started school rather than taking them out of school for a year to home school on the trip, not that we really thought it would happen. Well 2008 was a big year for all of us which resulted in a forced, but not unexpected change in my employment status and so our planning started to take shape in December 2008.
This might be a good time to introduce the rest of the family; Kristen, my beautiful wife of 16 years, we were married very young! She is extremely talented and has had to put on hold a successful career as a corporate consultant which she took up as a hobby after Jameson’s birth which grew to become a very important part of her life. Kristen’s big fear for the journey apart from spending so much time with me is CROCODILES! Jameson is our first child and has recently celebrated his fourth birthday. His loves, apart from his family are cars, bikes and anything with wheels. He is just old enough to understand that we are heading off for 12 month however has no concept of how long 12 months is! Our biggest fears are Jameson not listening to us and getting eaten by a CROCODILE! Sienna is our second child and is 2 ½ and has just started to really start to inject her personality in everything we do, she is a real little girl who also loves to play with her bears but also likes to play in the dirt. She is not afraid to stand up to Jameson, or anyone else for that matter, who gets in her way.