THE PEOPLE WE MEET BY CHRIS MORTON Tell us about yourself and your husband / family.
Rikki Schulze
We met Rikki while at the Mount Augustus Tourist Park. We got talking about the location, the drive in and what else there was to see in the region before we discovered that she and her husband had sold everything and had hit the road, permanently. Younger, permanent travellers is something we are seeing more often and it intrigued us as to the motivations that encourage this type of lifestyle. We posed some questions to Rikki, and this is how she responded.
G’day, my name is Rikki! I’m wife to Scott - genius with a spanner and the grower of an excellent beard and mum to Navanah - a ripper almost-7 year old and outdoor adventuring legend! We love camping, 4W driving and have newly discovered a love of fishing! I spent the last 17 years working 9 to 5 in a corporate desk job (or sometimes 5 to 5!) Scott is a drill fitter working a 2:2 roster on the mines and he flies in and out from wherever we are. We met through our parents 4WD club in Perth when we were kids, were reunited about 12 years ago as adults and the rest is history!
What has prompted you to this new lifestyle? It’s the dream, right? We talked about travelling long term in one form or another for years but were too comfortable in our jobs and our home to take the leap. We were geared up to do the big lap in 2020. We’d saved enough for a year, arranged everything with work and school and were ready to head off but of course, come March 2020 we couldn’t even leave home, let alone anything else! Once things started to return to normal, we spent a month travelling up the coast and something just clicked for the both of us. Within three months we’d sold our house, I’d quit my job of 17 years and enrolled Nav into distance education!
Where have you been so far? We’ve been to Shark Bay, then drove through from the Overlander Roadhouse to Auski (only seeing bitumen for about 40km) via Mount Augustus, Tom Price and Karijini. We were in Broome and around the Dampier Peninsula for a few weeks before hitting the Gibb River Road. We then spent Western 4W Driver #123 |
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