/The Bird Family

The Bird Family – Cassie, Cameron (William, Amelia & Harrison)
Socials – @gr8openroad

We are a family of 5 (mum, dad, 3 kiddos) who have been travelling both full and part time with a caravan since 2021. Mum (Cassie) is a high school teacher and dad (Cameron) is a fire fighter, we have since stretched our skillset to adapt to the travel life and pick up work in any vicinity. In 2022 we were both working full-time in stressful jobs with large commutes and juggling 2 kids. Covid really shook up our perspectives on life and we decided to chase freedom than be constantly bogged down by the 9-5.

We established our page GR8 Open Road in 2022 when we did our lap of Australia with our eldest 2 kids. We relocated to Victoria (from NSW) in 2023 and pulled up from travelling and settled down with family temporarily to work. Along came baby number 3 and while this may halt people’s plans to travel indefinitely, it only put our plan on a short pause as we sold our own car and van set up and made bigger and better plans to set ourselves up to travel permanently for the next couple years at least.

We enjoy documenting our travels for the memories, to show our family and friends what we are up to, and we have found that social media is a fantastic place to get in touch with new people and meet people along the road.

Travelling has brought our family together. We are now closer together as a couple, closer with our children. We are healthier, have shared great experiences and met some amazing people. While some people don’t survive full time travel, we thrived and are eager to get back out there.

Our first lap (2022 > 2023) spanned over 10 months with smaller trips in the lead up. The next lap we plan to be on the road for at least 2-3 years. We are on the last leg of our maiden trip in our Vibe caravan and it has been an absolute dream.

Australia is a vast country full of variety in what it has to offer. People always ask us what place is the best and our answer is always “it depends on what you’re looking for”. It is hard to compare Uluru or the Flinders Ranges to the Ningaloo Reef or Yorke Peninsula as they all offer amazing experiences for different reasons. Our personal top pick would have to be the Exmouth Region. It offers the amazing Ningaloo Reef for snorkeling, fishing, 4WDing, bushwalking, turtle hatching, whale shark swimming and best of all, beach camping. We visited in March and had fantastic weather and made lifelong friends.

We researched extensively in the lead up to choosing a caravan manufacturer to go with. We had some explicit design features that we wanted to incorporate and when we checked out Vibe they not only could do everything we wanted but also match it with competitive pricing and a high quality build.

Vibe have been amazing to deal with. We love that the company is backed by real people who value the quality of their work and who will go above and beyond to help their customers.