Some years ago my husband, John, and I took off with our Jayco Dove from our home in Kalbarri in Western Australia across the Nullarbor to explore the eastern side of the country and Tasmania. We had a wonderful three months and I suggested we start planning for the big lap around Australia. Unfortunately, John wasnt interested.
Fast forward a few years and, thankfully, he has changed his mind. At that time, our grandchildren were very young and it was hard to think of leaving them. But they have grown up and are busy doing their own thing. And.more grandchildren keep coming.
This is the first night of our big adventure, travelling Australia, and I am thinking back to how our idea became a reality.
How can we afford to travel Australia for twelve months?
We first had to work out how we could afford to spend a year travelling around Australia. I am 64 and a high school teacher, John is 76 and retired, so we are not really keen on backpacking and picking fruit. Luckily we had an investment property in Kalbarri, which was rented out. We decided to put it on the market to help finance our trip. It took nearly 18 months for the house to sell but that gave us time to put other things in place. In fact, we started to think it would never sell so, on a whim, we also put our home on the market! To be able to make our dream of travel a reality, we had to sell one of them. Our preference was to sell our Kalbarri house and rent out our home in Dongara.
The investment property eventually sold two weeks before Cyclone Seroja almost flattened the town. We were lucky although we felt for the new owners. The sale of the Kalbarri house financed the purchase of a caravan plus some money in the bank for our holiday fund.
We were busy planning and minimising so we could rent out our home in Dongara in fact, we were filling in the paperwork to get a tenant and filling up a local storage unit with our personal belongings (two weeks before our leaving date) when a lady knocked on the door and asked to look around the house. Although every room was full of packing boxes and the place was a mess, she told us she wanted to buy it! This was not what we had planned to be homeless but we had already discussed the fact that we did not want to return to a house with stairs and a garden, so we ended up selling both houses! I thought John would hate the idea as he has always been the sensible one who likes to have his base, while I am the one who gets bored and wants to move or travel. I usually have to drag him along or, sometimes, I go with my children or friends and leave him at home. However, he was quite happy to live dangerously for a change!
