When Dani was 4 years old, her parents packed up and travelled and worked their way around Australia for 5 years!  The travel bug was planted and Dani couldn’t wait to hit the road with her own little family – once she got hubby onboard, Donohoe’s Downunder was born and they are now on their own working & travelling caravan adventure.  Real Stories | Real Families….

Hi there! We are the Donohoe family, Corey (32), Dani (31), Ruby (4) and Nate (2) from Western Australia.

The dream of travelling around Australia was mine (Dani’s) to begin with. My parents sold their house in Perth when I was 5years old, got a car and caravan and off we went as a family of 4, travelling and working around Australia for 5 years. After 5 years of being on the road we settled in Bunbury WA and that has been home ever since.

Corey was born and raised in Bunbury and with not having travelled at all came on board with my dream after years of talking about it. Before having children we had both been up and down Western Australia a few times together. Moving up and back to the Pilbara for work twice in 4 years then decided to move back to Bunbury as we start a family.

Corey was working fifo, 4 weeks away and 1 week home at this stage and he continued fifo until Ruby was 10 months old. It was really hard but looking back now it was worth it because it has set us up for what we’re doing now. After having Nate 2 years later we started to get itchy feet and felt like we had been in the same place for too long. Dani had always wanted to travel Australia at some point in our lives and we started to think that now is the time.

We made the decision!!

We were going to travel Australia and started organising ourselves what would we do with our house, what we had to do to get the car and caravan and to tell our friends and family.

After a lot of research about what caravan and car we needed we realised we to sell our beloved FJ cruiser and Corey being the man fisherman that he is (and I mean totally addicted to the ocean! If it’s a nice day on the water he would cancel any plans we had just to go out on the boat) had to part ways with his dreamboat so that we could buy our caravan.

We got ourselves set up with our Toyota Land cruiser 100 series with a tinny on top and Jayco Starcraft Outback Caravan and started to go away on camping trips to test out our setup. Nate was 10 months old at the time so we had to make the bottom bunk baby proof and Ruby was 2 and ½ and loved being on the top bunk. Both kids had no trouble at all settling into sleeping and being in a caravan, they loved it when we went away for weekends, which made us feel confident in our decision to become a family travelling around Aus.

The decision to travel was easy!! The hard part was getting rid of everything we owned and saying goodbye to friends and family. This process was hard because while Dani was holding on to memories and “things” that we might need one day Corey was ruthless and wanted to throw/give away everything!! This was a major compromising situation where we had to work together and really think about what were the items we just couldn’t get ride of – Family treasures, photos and other sentimental items and we packed them up into a trailer and have stored it with family. Then to sell/throw and give away the rest. After finally doing all that with many tears of sadness and relief we felt amazing!! We rented our house out, had a massive going away party and off we went.

The first leg of our journey was back up to Karratha. We had decided to work there for about 8 months then leave when it started to get too hot. Corey worked on various shut downs and project work while Dani started a hobby on the side as a hair stylist, braiding many girls hair with coloured extensions. Ruby had already started Kindy in Bunbury so we transferred her to a school in Karratha where she made some amazing friends who then we got to know and we went on some camping adventures together to some pretty cool places in the Pilbara. Leaving town again was hard to say goodbye because within those 8 months we had made some special friendships.

This brings us up to now.

Corey had been offered a job in Tasmania and with all options opened we thought why not?! So he accepted the job, we bought our tickets on the Spirit of Tasmania and we left Karratha November 19th 2018 and started to head south, needing to be in Melbourne for New Years Eve to be on the SOT on January 1st 2019.

We have loved exploring Tasmania so far in between work and after we have finished here we don’t have any particular plans but we are really looking forward to exploring far north Queensland and all the fishing hotspots anyone has to share!! Hopefully we will have plenty of fishing spots ourselves to share. Please check out our facebook page Donohoe’s Down Under as we have been documenting our journey so far and we hope to meet many families on the road making memories just like us J see you out there Aussie travellers

Danielle

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