For six years, travelling Australia was something we talked about.
One day we'd do it.
One day we'd pack everything up, hitch a caravan to the Patrol and take the kids around Australia.
There was always a reason why that day couldn't be today. Work, school, the house, money, commitments — normal life kept moving and the idea of doing a lap stayed somewhere in the future.
Until eventually we decided to stop talking about it.
We sold the house we'd called home for 15 years, packed what we needed into our Great Escape caravan and Y62 Patrol, and suddenly there wasn't a house waiting for us to come back to.
This wasn't a holiday anymore.
We were actually doing it.
Leaving Home
The strange thing about starting something you've planned for so long is that the first day doesn't necessarily feel as big as you expect it to.
There's no starting line.
Nobody waves a flag.
You hitch the caravan up, check everything for probably the tenth time, get everyone into the car and drive away.
Except this time we weren't coming home in a week or two.
The caravan behind us was home.
Everything we'd been planning for years was now sitting either in the van or the Patrol, and the four of us — Kyle, Tara, Chad and Quin — were finally on our way.
The First Stop
We didn't start the lap by racing straight towards one of Australia's big bucket-list destinations.
Our first part of the trip followed the Murray, gradually settling into life on the road and figuring out what full-time travel actually looked like for us.
And that's probably the best way we could have started.
There were no strict schedules telling us where we had to be every night. We could pull up somewhere, explore, stay a little longer if we wanted and move on when we were ready.
After years where life revolved around work, school and everything that needed to be done at home, suddenly our biggest decision was often simply:
Where are we going next?
Learning to Live Differently
Living in a caravan full-time is obviously very different from taking one away for a weekend.
Everything has a place.
Water matters.
Power matters.
What you buy at the supermarket matters because you've only got so much room to put it.
And when four people are living together in a caravan, you very quickly discover that personal space is now more of a concept than an actual thing.
But we also started getting something we'd wanted from this trip from the beginning.
More time together.
The kids weren't disappearing off to school every morning while we disappeared into work. We were travelling together, exploring together and experiencing places none of us had seen before.
Roadschool became part of the routine.
So did packing up camp, hitching the van, finding somewhere new and setting everything up again.
What had seemed completely foreign started becoming normal surprisingly quickly.
Our First Free Camps
Some of our favourite early stops weren't caravan parks or major tourist attractions.
They were simple camps beside rivers and out in the middle of nowhere.
Places like Bunnerungee Bridge on the Anabranch, where we pulled up and had the place to ourselves.
No powered site.
No jumping pillow.
No resort-style facilities.
Just the caravan, the family and somewhere quiet to spend the night.
Those stops started showing us pretty quickly that travelling Australia wasn't going to be about constantly chasing the biggest attraction.
Sometimes the places we'd barely heard of would end up being the ones we remembered.
Heading Further From Home
As we continued north-west, the scenery started changing.
The towns became smaller.
The distances between them became longer.
Eventually we reached Broken Hill, Silverton and the beginning of the country we'd been looking forward to exploring for years.
Old mines.
Outback pubs.
Historic railway sites.
Red dirt.
Long stretches of road disappearing into the distance.
The lap finally started to feel real.
We weren't just away from home anymore.
We didn't have a home to rush back to.
Home was travelling behind us.
Six Years of Planning Came Down to One Decision
Looking back, there were probably a hundred reasons we could have kept putting the trip off.
There always will be.
Doing something like this with two kids isn't necessarily the easiest option. Selling the house, stepping away from the routine we'd known for years and changing almost everything about how we lived was a massive decision.
But eventually we realised there probably wasn't going to be a perfect time.
The kids weren't getting any younger.
Neither were we.
So we went.
We don't know exactly where this lap will take us or how long we'll ultimately stay on the road.
That's part of it.
What we do know is that after six years of saying "one day", one day finally arrived.
We hitched up the Great Escape, climbed into the Patrol and started driving.
All four of us.
And that's where this adventure really begins.
