...But YOU'RE Not Adventurous!

“Who am I to talk about being adventurous?”

I hear this question every time I begin a post or photo – not from trolls, but from my own inner voice. It’s the fear that creeps in when I wonder if I should tell my friends and family about my new ‘thing’.

“But…you’re not an adventurous family…you’re just a normal family, living a normal life,” they say in my imaginary conversations. “You don’t even have hiking boots.”

That’s when it hits me: Yes, but that’s exactly the point!

We are a boring, normal family (in this case – ‘normal’ refers to not living in a campervan/RV, worldschooling our kids, living out of backpacks on an endless global holiday, or hiking Mt Everest with a baby on my back). We rent a house, my daughter goes to the local school, my husband works full time and I’m currently a stay-at-home mum with my preschooler. We live on a single income, which means everything we do is pretty low-budget. We don’t look like ‘adventurous people’.

our Backstory (if you really want to know)

But if you go back in time a couple (ok, maybe a lot of) years, you’d find me in a tiny traditional village in the north of Romania, and you’d find my husband in a village in Ethiopia. We met (in Australia) and bonded over our passion to travel and to help refugees in our communities (which turned out we mostly just loved always being around people from different cultures and who spoke different languages). We always dreamed of being the couple who lived in a foreign country, and whose kids were well-travelled. Together and individually we’d travelled through countries like Vietnam and Vanuata, to Sweden and Slovenia.

Our early attempts at travel with our first baby were so terrible we were scared to even visit family a couple hours away. The screams, the sleep deprivation, the shock of not being able to enjoy travel… we retreated into our own little lives.

On the plus side, we discovered a love for local community and a sense of home and place.

And then there was the issue of money. We backpacked together as a young couple before kids, and realised we couldn’t sustain travel fulltime without an income. My husband was offered a job in the Coffs Harbour region (Australia) and we leapt at the chance to move to the coast. Of course, having babies means you start to think about where you will live, and when we got kicked out of our rental on my due date with my first baby, we decided to save up for our own house. Since then we’ve been living on a single income while I’ve been a stay-at-home mum.

I feel like my husband and I were on the cusp of having an adventurous life, but then we got married, got jobs and settled into a typical family life (all of which have been an adventure in themselves!). The idea of spending our savings on travel became risky and wasteful, rather than exciting and worthwhile. Travel felt out-of-reach with our sensitive kids and home-ownership dreams. We became – despite our younger-selves’ biggest fears – a ‘normal Australian family’. We look the same as everyone else on the outside, but inside we have this desire for freedom and adventure and culture and travel that just keeps growing.

The year my baby girl turned five, we started camping again. Not serious camping like a real adventure family, but little weekend trips to super exciting caravan parks with water slides, jumping pillows, pools and cafes. Yeah, hardcore. It was fun though, to be out in a tent together, getting dirty and using shared amenities, forgetting about routines and getting up close with too-tame wildlife. Our kids loved it so much they begged us all the time to “go camping again”. We began to think…maybe we can do this stuff now.

Then my daughter started school and we didn’t camp for a whole year. But my son, who has endless energy, prompted me to start exploring local areas where he could spend the morning outdoors in nature. I began an Adventure Day challenge (for myself) and once a week, or month, we’d go somewhere new together for the morning. It was a fun way to fit in exercise, get outside, tire him out, and make memories together. It redefined what ‘adventure’ meant to me.

“Adventure is an attitude. Adventure is doing something that is new. Something difficult. Exciting. Daunting. Something with a significant chance of failure and an enticing sense of satisfaction upon completion.” - Alastair Humphreys What Is Adventure?

Now my son has one year left before school. I want to start doing more camping weekends again (not just at holiday parks), and I want to get my kids used to travelling. We aren’t an adventurous family, but everyone has to start somewhere. We can’t be the only ones out there hoping to fit more adventure and fun into their normal lives.

Now, Come Along for the journey

Something entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuck says is “document, don’t create”. And what that means to me is that you don’t have to be an expert in something, making ‘how to’ videos and courses. We can just document how we are doing things and let people come along with us, on the journey. That’s what I want to do. I want to show you how this normal-life family of mine is learning to become more adventurous in our own way, to make the most of this time we have together and to do it without being epic adventure experts. Everything we do is to get outside, spend time together, and make memories. Unlike other adventure families, we’re doing it all without quitting regular school, work or social lives. This is our journey to become an adventurous family, and I hope you’ll come along with us. It may not be a smooth ride, but it’s going to be fun.

So when I hear that voice, saying “but you’re not adventurous”, I remind myself now - that’s the whole point.