Hello 2014,

Can I please tell you, right from the start, how pleased I am to see you!

It’s not that 2013 was a particularly bad year, however, it didn’t really go to plan. A year not going to plan isn’t unusual of course, I’m sure it’s true for most people that their yearly expectations are often a great distance away from their yearly reality!

The thing is, 2013 threw us plenty of challenges we didn’t need. I can proudly write this today and say that we survived each and every one of those challenges and we learned important lessons in the process which is always a good thing!
This year however we say goodbye 2013 leaving so much behind us now, and those challenges we’ve faced mean the future is shining brighter than ever before.

We are ready,
We are excited,
We are grateful,
We are living our dream in 2014!

When Dreams Become Reality & Some Hard Truths.

In a couple of weeks we will be living full-time on the road and sharing our journey and all the amazing things we uncover with our readers. We will be exploring Australia with our kids and our kelpie by our side.

Our dreams, the ones we’ve spoken of so often over the last couple of years, are finally coming true. In less than two weeks, we’ll be driving away from my brothers’ house where we’ve been staying for the last few months, and we’ll be truly nomadic. Living on the road, travelling Australia stopping wherever we feel the desire to, or wherever work takes us.

But, we’ve learned so many lessons on our journey to “living the dream”.

We’ve learned that dreams are hard work. They are possible to achieve, but, most dreams, if they are worth achieving will take A LOT of hard work, they won’t magically happen just because you want them to, you really need to keep focused and keep moving forward.

Following your dreams means sacrifice. It would be nice to think that you can have everything in life, but the hard truth is, that’s just not possible. In order to achieve our dream to travel nomadically, we had to sacrifice many things, some of which are a bigger struggle than others. We sold our business at a loss, left behind friends and family, we struggle with the parenting guilt of perhaps not doing the right thing by our kids taking them away from their friends. We’re sacrificing building certain types of careers, or buying a house. The reality of it is though, when we looked closely at what we really wanted out of life, sacrificing those things was much easier to do than missing out on our dream.

Achieving your dreams is scary. We joke all the time with people who ask us about what we’re doing with our travels, that it takes a crazy person to be willing to sell or give away most of what they own to drag three kids and a dog around Australia. We’ve been told many times “Oh I wish we could do that.” The truth is, that anyone could travel Australia, but it’s a bloody scary thing to do. It’s not easy to go against the grain and do something your heart longs to do, when it seems to fly in the face of what everyone else considers responsible. It’s scary and you doubt yourself regularly, but, we still wouldn’t stop moving forward, we’re sure it’s the right decision for us and our family.

Hiccups will get in the road of your dream. Matt got sick last year. After a stack of tests, nothing came back concrete and that was almost more worrying than him being sick in the first place. The great news is, that he’s fine, and we’re pretty sure he’ll be fine for a long time to come. We also ended up much worse off financially than we anticipated. That wasn’t going to stop us however. We had decided even if we didn’t end up being able to afford a caravan, we would just take our tent. Things worked out wonderfully and we have our van, Matt is well, and we just took the hiccups as we were confronted by them and took it one step at a time.

A support network is invaluable. As hard as we’ve worked to get to where we are, there have been moments that having a support network has helped us very much. You don’t need a huge support network, but it definitely helps having people in your corner, encouraging you to fight hard for what you want.

Our Biggest Lesson

You must live your life for the now, while working towards your dreams. Don’t let your own self stand in the way of achieving your dream. It won’t be easy, we can almost promise you that, but it will be worth it.

We’re looking really forward to 2014, the year where all our hard work and struggle sees us setting off on our adventure with our children and our dog, with our car and our van, and the basics we need and venturing around amazing landscapes and communities and meeting amazing, everyday people as they keep our country ticking over.

We’ll talk more about how we’ve achieved our dream, what we’re travelling with, what we do and don’t need, what we do and don’t like, and what you can do to achieve your family travel dreams, as we blog this year. We hope to bring you useful info, and inspire you to live your dreams as a family, whatever they are.

Happy New Year from our family to yours, wishing you an amazing year!

Matt, Loreena & Kids.