5 year plan

One of our favourite children's book authors is Alison Lester, first discovered when a friend gave us their son's favourite childhood book, Magic Beach. Dante loved it and we read it night after night for weeks! Now Atticus loves it as well and Dan and I can recite it blind-folded.

Last night, however, we delved into another of her works. Are We There Yet? chronicles the journey of Grace and her family around Australia with their camper van. It's a terrific story, with wonderful pictures of the places they went and a great map at the front of the book.

Grace is 8 in the book and has two brothers, one older and one younger. Atticus is three now so in five years time our family will be roughly the same ages as the family in the book. Dan and I had a good look at the map (which incidentally answers the question of how to get to the centre of Australia without too much backtracking (head East from Broome then veer South East to Alice Springs and Uluru, then up to Darwin, backtrack a little bit South again and then head East to Queensland)) and decided that it is a great plan!

We would, of course, start at a different point (since we are in Sydney and the book starts South East of Adelaide). And we would probably go in the opposite direction, heading North to Queensland first to take advantage of the winter (wouldn't be quite so hot up North and by the time we got South it would hopefully not be as chilly)!

I'm quite excited about the idea. It's a long way off but that means we'll have plenty of time to plan and save up days of leave (as well as money)! We have a great guide book that we can study every night with the kids, too :) I think it will be a wonderful experience for the kids and for us as a family. The kids will be older so it won't be as difficult as if we went now... can you imagine? (I don't even want to think about it!)

So anyway, that's my plan. It's not really a well thought out plan, but it's a start! I've always wanted to travel around this magnificent country of ours and with luck (and a lot of organisation) I will finally get to do it!