thewills'wanderings

Well……. not our life, just our stuff. It just feels like our life.The box is a storage container where we’ll be keeping everything that we can’t carry on our back or drag along beside us for the year.(not including our children)

The last few weeks have been quite crazy. Packing up our house, making endless plates of food for end of year shared lunches, buying secret santa presents, deciding what we need to take with us overseas, getting the kid’s to sort through all of their precious belongings and only keep what REALLY is precious, selling things on trade-me to fund our theme park trips in Aussie, attending final assemblies and Christmas parties, cancelling accounts, sorting home-schooling material and lots of other things that I just really cannot remember right now. For the last few days we’ve had just our camping gear left in our house, so we’re all sleeping on camping mattresses and using our camping cooking gear for cooking etc. We do have the luxury of having our fridge until the last minute so it’s been quite fun really. It’s nice having a clutter free house and not much to clean up. We still have our Christmas tree twinkling in the corner. That’s just something I can’t do without and when we move into Adventure Specialties on Saturday we’ll take it there, cos I just couldn’t cope with having no tree leading up to Christmas.

So,the countdown is on and our adventure is starting to unfold!

We have a taken a year out of our life to travel as a family. It’s something we’ve always thought about but about eighteen months ago we really started to try to make it happen. I clearly remember the moment when I thought “wow, we could do it”. I had been speaking to Lee Harris from church and she was telling me about their planned trip to the UK and then sailing in the Mediteranean with their girls. My heart raced when I heard of their plans.  A few nights earlier Tim had said, “I guess if we’re going to do this overseas thing we should do it soon before Michaella starts high school”.  So that for me was the start of the dream. Not long after that we had a private offer on our house after spending a few years doing up houses. We had tried to sell 6 months earlier and much to everyones surprise we hadn’t been able to. Then out of the blue we sold, without even trying, which in hindsight was so great and has made this all possible.

So in November last year we moved out of our fantastic tree house in Woodlands Park into a small 3 bedroom not so fantastic rental. We decided to rent for the year and try to use our money creatively to help fund our overseas trip. For me, this whole year has been part of the big plan and while I’ve been frustrated with our little house and scabby kitchen and bathroom, I’ve known that it’s all part of the plan.

Throughout the year I’ve spent endless hours on the internet researching, dreaming, budgeting and now here we are with tickets booked, bags almost packed and boxes all around us. I can hardly believe it!

February to April We fly to Brisbane where we will  buy a vehicle of some sort and then pick up the caravan which has kindly been loaned to us by Steve P's parents(thanks!!). We will then camp up and down the ... [Continue reading this entry]

I guess this is the question we have been asked the most often. People that don't know us, like the random strangers we've got talking to at the beach, or the travel agent or bank teller to name a few ... [Continue reading this entry]