It’s already March and 2022 has proven to have been a VERY busy year for us. We moved out of our home in the South Coast, got married, and have now moved into our self made camper van, and are currently heading north on our year-long honeymoon around Australia.

The plan for this trip is to immerse ourselves in nature, get inspired, explore and create as much as we can. I’ve packed paints, sketchbooks, and all sorts of mediums along with my camera gear neatly into the van next to Cristian’s guitar and carefully selected surfboard quiver. I hope to capture where we go and what inspires me. It’s been about two years in the making and we’re so excited to finally be on the road!

Our route will take us north from Sydney, via the Northern Rivers into Queensland, up around to Northern Territory, with a dip down to the red center, and then to the left through to Western Australia, then hug the coastline down and around to South Australia, Victoria and finally scoot over to Tasmania before arriving back in New South Wales.

It’s the end of week three and we’ve made it into Queensland after a two-week stint just south of Coffs Harbour after being forced to bunker down in Urunga, waiting for Brisbane and the Northern Rivers to stop flooding after a catastrophic amount of rain has soaked the region for the last two weeks. This also happened to be the first week of hitting the road so we’ve gone straight into the thick of it, discovering a couple of small leaks and coming to terms with living in a small space. This restructured our plan as we ended up hanging in Scotts Head (which was our favourite place so far) waiting for some admin tasks to be finalised and also waiting for the rain to give up before we could pass through Northern Rivers.

Since leaving home we’ve stopped off at Mungo Brush next to Myall Lakes which led to us seeing dingos around our campsite about 24 hours into our trip. Then onto the beautiful town of Seal Rocks where we patiently waited for a 2-meter python to cross the street after watching big manta rays frolic in the bay. Finally, we reached Crescent Head where we enjoyed pods of dolphins jumping and surfing the famous waves.

Instead of staying Coffs Harbour, we opted for the surfing Sikh town of Woolgoolga and neighboring town, Mullaway. These two places were soo beautiful and had a huge swell hit the shores as we explored them. Some photos down below of one of the brave locals going out in 5 metre waves. Then of course more rain hit and so we continued north to try escape it up in Queensland.

All the rain forced us to really put into use the comforts we’d installed in the van when originally designing it to resemble our living room! Our L shape lounge got a good workout as we spent most nights watching Netflix on the pull-down projector, and its been great having the space to stand up and walk around in the van. I’ve been lucky enough to have the majority of meals cooked by Cristian who has been smashing out shakshuka, Indian dahl curries, lots of new recipes and countless cooked big breakfasts on our Companion gas oven and cooker in our kitchen setup and its been just as good as cooking at home!. We’ve also been storing our weekly veg and condiments n a 62 litre Dometic upright fridge which is surprisingly deep and holds a 6 pack along with all your essential fridge staples so pretty ideal for us. Our favourite meals have been the ones we can cook on the open fire when staying in the bush - jacket roast potatoes and BBQ, buttered charred corn, veg and burgers have never tasted so good!

Now we’re in Queensland the sun has started to show its face a little bit more so we’ve headed to the Sunshine Coast to soak up as much vitamin D and sea as possible with plans to head to Fraser Island for some 4x4 adventures then make our way north to Cairns!

I’ll leave you with some of the highlight reel from our first month and hopefully will be able to keep this up as we travel along!