It is our anniversary

If anyone had told me three or four years ago that in July 2012 both Peter and I would have finished work and be travelling Australia I would not have believed it.  Yet today (4th July) we celebrate our first anniversary since we left Melbourne to commence our trip around Australia.  What a year that has been!

We left Montmorency on a wet, windy and cold Monday morning and have travelled north, south, east and west and sometimes it seems everywhere in between since that day.  We have completed four of our six planned stages, and stage five is now underway.  We have driven 32,188 in the Nissan Patrol and a further 4.376 in rental cars whilst the Nissan was off the road.  We have visited every State in Australia and have grown to love the outback.  We are unsure we ever want to experience a cold winter again - we may just have to visit the northern areas of Australia during those months.  We haven't seen rain fall for over four months now and we could never say that in Melbourne or New Zealand.  We have walked so many gorges at times we feel we have been "gorged" out but there is always a new one to see and they are always different to any other we have visited.

We have chosen our favourite places, then visited another new place and got confused.  We often think that this is our one and only visit to this area so we have to see as much as possible.  Australia is so diverse and we meet so many interesting people who all want to share their experiences and recommend places to go. 

We didn't win lotto.  We are not rich.  Sometimes I worry about the money we are spending and how much longer it would have lasted if we had just retired and stayed home, whether that be in Australia or in New Zealand.  However, we made a choice after a life changing experience and we have no regrets with that decision.  We not only retired to spend every day together, we spend every day together, many hours in the car and share a caravan which is much smaller than any home we have lived in.  We are living our dream of travelling Australia together - there was no way Peter was going to have that experience on his own.  Without such a significant push we would have still been working away every day dreaming that one day in the future we will be free to follow our dreams.  We did it and there is no going back!