Dream believer

It was 2012 and apart from a few holidays to Australia I had been living in my coastal hometown Whangarei, New Zealand for 38 years. 

Then a defining moment in my life, April 2012 I was blessed to visit my parents who were living in Split, Croatia at the time.  WOW is an understatement.  This new land I had ended up in by sheer opportunity was mesmerising.  


I had never seen anything like this place in my lifetime.  White stone walls, terra cotta roof tiles, ancient castles and cathedrals, rugged mountains contrast against the crystal clear, blue waters of the Adriatic Sea and mazes of stone paths and alley ways to traverse on foot.

I was fortunate to explore this captivating region with my parents for ten days and this experience awoken the travel bug inside me.  Click, click, click went my camera, everywhere I looked I wanted to capture these memories.  I still reminisce over these photos today.

My passion for travel and photography started bubbling inside me.

My husband Warwick is a very adventurous, Bear Grylls kind of guy and although we hadn’t done a lot of overseas travel together we enjoyed regular camping and sailing trips in his Hartley trailer sailor which he affectionately named Danger! 

We decided this was the time!  It was now or never!  We talked to our three kids (7, 12 and 14 at the time) and we all agreed to move to Australia.  How we chose where to settle and our take a chance move to Australia is an interesting and humorous story, read more on my blog post Across the ditch.

We have now been living in Townsville, Australia for 4.5 years.  For the first two years, we were busy checking out spectacular new places every spare minute we had.  But as always, the habitual rut of work and school routine and a simple case of been there, done that set in!  We were getting bored living in the suburbs.

I was so amped the day I found out that Open Colleges Australia offered an online study Travel Writing & Photography Course, 41 years old I had finally found my passion! I enrolled that very day and have completed the course.  A late bloomer but better late than never.

During this time, Warwick was wanting to realise one of his dreams, living on a boat! With over 300 days of sunshine a year, Townsville was the perfect place to purchase and live on a boat!  We are now living on our 42-foot launch Too Easy with our three kids Courtney, Taylor and Ben.

Downsizing and moving onto a boat was an adventure itself!  Check out my blog post Too easy living the dream if you would like to learn more about our transition from land to sea.

We are now fortunate enough to explore Townsville by sea and visit some amazing places with intriguing history that you can only reach by boat.  This is where the idea of my blog came about, we would love to share the amazing places we visit, our adventures with words and pictures.

There are so many places on this earth waiting to be explored, slowly but steadily we are ticking a few off our bucket list.