Meet the Masons

The Below post is from September 2011

I have officially resigned from work this week, and so there is no turning back now! Therefore, it is time to 'reveal' who we are! I didn't really want to make our identity known prior to resigning from my work, but now that we are 100% committed, we are happy to reveal who we are...

As I have mentioned in previous posts, we are a regular family of 5... There's Mike (30 something) and Liz (also 30 something), along with Josh (7), Natalie (5) and Sam (3). Josh is currently in year 1 at school, and Natalie and Sam are at preschool a couple of days a week.

We live in the lovely North of Sydney, and love our neighbourhood, and our home. I have also been enjoying my job too, so this trip was definitely a hard decision to make, but it is either now, when the kids are young, or after they have left school. We figure that you can always make another dollar, but you can't make another minute, so we'll bite the bullet and go now. This is either brave, or stupid!! I'd like to think it's brave, but time will definitely tell.

So I leave work for the last time (at least I think it will be the last time - again, who knows what the future holds) on the 7th October, and therefore we think that we'll be driving out of Sydney before the 13th of October 2011. This means we will be leaving Sydney during the first week of Term 4, 2011 and it will be good to leave after the school holidays are over (because it will be slightly quieter, and slightly cheaper too).

Our first destination will be Canberra.

Things are certainly starting to blur. We've got a house to empty, a garage sale to have, boxes to pack, and all the other things to prepare, but we're thoroughly enjoying it, and are very excited about the times to come.


The Below post is from July 2011:

It is almost time to 'reveal' who we are!  As soon as I resign from work (likely to be in September), then it'll definitely be public knowledge and I'll have no reservations in telling anyone who wishes to read who we are and what makes us 'tic'.

There's one important reason for updating the blog today...  I have been mulling over in my own mind what this blog's purpose actually is! so I thought I'd document the thought process of writing a blog in the first place...

When we first had discussions about making our 'crazy idea' into reality, I knew that I'd be writing a blog, but I probably didn't know why.  There are many reasons that I thought I would write a blog of our travels, including: 1) keeping a diary of our travels (without using all the paper!), 2) letting our friends and loved ones know what we are up to, where we are, and what we have seen  (however twitter and facebook could do this just as well as this blog!)  3) to share the learnings that we discover with other fellow human beings who are interested in following in our footsteps, or just interested in a read!
These are all very good things, and aspects of these things ring true for the purposer of this blog, but I don't think that any of them quite hit the nail on the head...

I think that the biggest reason for us writing a blog, is for the benefit of our three beautiful kids.  I'd really like this to be something that they can look back at and discover our motivations, the process we all went through, the places we saw, the people we met, the good times, the bad times and the beautiful country that we live in.  I am pretty sure that they won't remember too much of our trip.  No doubt there will be highlights etched in their memory, but most of the trip will be remembered through photographs and videos and this blog!

So I guess with this in mind, I will be trying to write this blog to be interesting to any reader (and questions/comments are most welcome), but my primary goal will be to document our adventures for our kids to remember what we got up to as a family in 2011/2012.


Original Post Below (May 2010):

I'd like to be able to tell you all about us, but at this point it's a bit hard to talk about any specifics!  The reason for this is that "We had a dream..." (in the most Martin Luther King voice you can imagine)  and so far, that's about all it is - however we believe that it will soon start to take shape.  Although we are fairly certain we will push ahead with our plan, we haven't told anyone about our plans - not even our kids, because you just never know what the future might hold and so we'll wait unitl we are fully commited until we make our plans public. Our Kids are all under 6 - and you know what they're like keeping a secret!!

Anyway, so who are we...  I'll narrow it down a little, so you get the idea about our background and situation but not so close as to have anyone (especially from work) reading this and asking those difficult questions...

We live in Sydney... so can you guess who we are? :)

We are a regular family of 5...  2 parents and 3 kids (all under 6, as I stated before).  Overall, we are very content with everything in our lives - except the amount of family time that we get together.  This is mainly due to a busy (and sometimes stressful) job at a large multi-national company.  The moderately extensive commute doesn't help either, then add on top of that a few 'extra curricular' activities that have been part of our routine for years, and it doesn't leave all that much time for being a family!

We have recently come to realise that life is short, very short and that if you have a dream, you never know when you will get to fulfil it, so... Carpe Diam (Sieze the day).  Some wise man once said 'Eat, drink and be Merry for tomorrow we die', and I think he's pretty much on the money!

That's about all we'll say at the moment, but this page will certainly grow (and become less cryptic) as time goes on.