be ignoring my intuition to do so. There may have been fear but there was also an undeniable truth and a rousing belief that this was the only way forward. Road-tripping around Australia was a surprising choice for me at the time, my fourth baby in my arms, dreams of home ownership almost realised. But if I consider the whole picture, the idea had been floating around since I tore a page from a magazine and stuck it on my bedroom wall fifteen years earlier. It was a photo of a girl, standing in a small, vintage caravan, a linen tea towel hung over the door, a wooden broom leaning against the window. It was a picture of simplicity and adventure, albeit styled, and it enraptured me. I was so enthralled by the idea of simple travel that I spent far too many hours researching books when I should have been stacking the shelves of the bookshop I worked in. I ordered stories on nomadic living and the Romanies and added the biographies of female travellers to my reading pile. Years later, in our first family home, there was a pink pinboard in the kitchen so when I was unpacking boxes and came across the girl in the caravan, I pinned it to the board and occasionally looked at it while I stirred dinner, my firstborn perched on my hip. I had ruminated on that picture and what it meant to me for close to two decades before I acted on it. Some may say that I’d unintentionally created a manifestation board; perhaps it was just a charming coincidence. Mostly, I think the concept of caravan travel had been there for years and while it hadn’t been front of mind for a long time, it sat just below the surface, waiting for an opportunity to be realised. I think we’ve all got these dreams tucked away somewhere, brewing. They may come to mind when we’re thinking about what could be or what we most want. When we reach those points that push us to think about our true purpose, that’s when we tap into the ideas and inspirations that we’ve filed away for another time. Choosing new adventures for ourselves seems like such a frivolous, childlike notion, but I honestly believe it’s how we instinctively navigate the world. But, as with so much of our childhood—tree climbing, mud pies and 36
make believe—we lose sight of it as we grow. We get caught up in the rush and the race, carried along without awareness, until the day when something shifts and we step back to see where we’ve landed. When people asked me what we were doing and where we were going, I would rattle off my flippant, highly unresearched plans, which, in retrospect, were the largest and wildest overestimations of my life. But what I really wanted to scream to all those people who asked questions was: I have no idea what we’re doing or where we’re going but we’re doing it anyway and if I think about it too much I won’t do it! So I just focused on the beginning, getting there one step at a time. In the words of the great explorer Amelia Earhart: the most effective way to do it, is to do it. So, I did. I adopted the mentality that we’d work it out as we went along, which I now know is the very essence of nomadic living. As with most adventures, it was never about the destination but about letting go, shedding our possessions, practising simplicity on a new level of less and simply spending time, together.
Saying yes to this adventure meant also realising that I was responsible for my contentment. The adventure wasn’t so much about where we were going or what we were doing, but it had everything to do with the way I saw the world, the way my perspective shifted, the way I settled into my body as I stood barefoot on the sand, the ocean in front, the van behind, a gaggle of kids shrieking as they raced towards the waves. It has always been about these moments—some lasting mere minutes, others stretching out for days—a strange time capsule of experience and
