Hey! We’re Ben and Michelle and welcome to our website.
On BenAndMichelle.com we share about our journey around Australia, how we came to do this trip, all the planning involved, and snapshots of what life on the road is like.
Since you’re on this page though, you obviously want to know a little bit about us. So here goes…
Well, I was born in…. heehee, nah just kidding! We won’t go back THAT far.
Michelle is a Kiwi, having grown up in Auckland she flew the nest and did her two years of the Big OE visiting the USA, Europe and Africa. Upon returning she realised little ‘ole New Zealand couldn’t contain her new worldly perspective and headed to the big smoke, Sydney Australia.
Ben is an Aussie, born in Adelaide but when he was about 10 years old the family moved to Sydney and then Dapto (south of Sydney). At 20, Ben moved back to Sydney, which was lucky because… within a week of Michelle landing in Sydney, she met Ben.
What ensued was 7 years of being best friends with a dizzying roundabout of on-again-off-again relationship. In 2007 we got married in Sydney and it’s been lollipops and rainbows every since. (True! See photographic evidence of lollipops below)
In 2010 we moved back to Auckland, New Zealand where Michelle worked as a data analyst for an infrastructure company and Ben as a caretaker at a high school.
We’re both now in our forties (Michelle is four years older but we try not to mention that fact too many times; you know, self-preservation and stuff…) with no kids.
This trip around Australia is the fulfilment of a life-long dream which we didn’t think we would be able to do for many years yet. But we realised that our lives were just not fulfilling and we NEEDED to do something different. This trip is our ‘something different’.
We spent hours and hours researching to try and answer questions like: do we need a 4WD, which camper trailer can we afford, could we travel with just a tent, what about a toilet, how are we going to power our laptops, what places will we visit and, the biggest question of all, how much money will we need?
We figured that if we’re asking all these questions, then there are surely other people who are also asking them. Apparently, there are 80-100k people travelling the lap around Australia every year (absolutely no reputable reference for those numbers, I read 80k on one blog and 100k on another so at best, it’s a guess) so that’s a lot of people who are going through the intense research that we are. So why not create a blog and put ALL the information we’re finding, in the one place.
We hope you find this website useful (I’ve just wasted HOURS of my life if you don’t :-/) and if you have any questions, please feel free to send us an email via our contact form and we’ll do our best to answer them all.
Most of all, we really hope that our site inspires you to travel around Australia and see this beautiful country for yourself. Maybe you’ll see that if it can be done by a couple of people who don’t really know what they’re doing and don’t have much money, then you can do it too.
We’re trying our darndest to post here regularly, but you may have more luck finding us on facebook. You can like our page now so that you don’t miss any of our fascinating updates. 😛
If you want to see LOADS of great content on travelling around Australia, then follow us on Pinterest. I’m there most days curating lots of content and pinning the best pins I find.
Thanks for joining us, we’re glad to have you here!
