Welcome to Away with the Steiners! We are a family of four from New Zealand with a passion for travel and adventure.
We love to explore new and different places and share our travels online.
Though be ready for adventure – because we have a particular fondness for anywhere that takes us – truly – off the beaten track.
We left New Zealand six years ago with two kids and two backpacks and have been non-stop exploring and adventuring full-time since.
This site and our social channels have become our way of paying it forward with all the tips and tricks we’ve learned along the way.
We're a cliché ordinary family - with extra-ordinary dreams.
About Us
About UsOUR TRAVEL JOURNEY
What started out at the beginning of 2019 as a family gap year after leaving New Zealand with a 3-year-old and 5-year-old has turned into a lifestyle of learning and travel around the globe.
Gavin and I have visited 98 countries and with Harry and Oscar we have been to 88 together.
Though while it’s exciting to visit as many places as time allows. We’ve always been interested in spending as much time in one place as possible and going deeper into the culture and people of a destination.
We’ve revisited countries (some like Pakistan and India four or six times) and spent literally months living overseas in Morocco and the Cook Islands.
I was born in the Bay of Islands at the very north of New Zealand – but I had far from a stationary childhood…
I grew up going to school in the Pacific Islands in Vanuatu and New Caledonia where we spoke English at home, French in the classroom and Pidgin in the playground.
We lived fulltime on a yacht as a family of three teenagers, continuing high school by correspondence. I still have flashbacks to doing Year 12 Chemistry experiments on the end of a jetty somewhere in the Mediterranean!
Then I trained as a teacher in Auckland, New Zealand where after graduating I worked at the Refugee Resettlement Centre in Mangere East in South Auckland.
I met Gavin while I was a student and moved in about the same time we first travelled together to Papua New Guinea.
Which while it might sound like an obscure destination choice to some. I’m claiming it was Papua New Guinea that secured a great start to a relationship destined for shared adventure!
Gavin will gladly tell you about our first holiday together where we stayed at a convent on remote Bougainville. Or how from there our departure was delayed after a box of crabs got loose on the plane…
I worked as a teacher at the Refugee Resettlement Centre in Mangere East right up until Harry was born.
Then when Harry was almost one, we travelled with him as a baby to Vanuatu.
We visited the tiny school from my childhood with vivid memories of running to the beach to wash our blackboards in the lagoon and it was around nine months later that we welcomed Oscar to the family.
Today our boys are 9 and 11 with more than half of their life spent travelling around the globe and learning about our world.
Perhaps it was a combination of my island childhood, living fulltime on a yacht sailing as a teenager, or meeting so many different families from all around the world in my classroom.
Maybe it was meeting a partner who dared to dream beyond the norm or starting a family together that gave us the confidence in choosing a life less ordinary.
We both had jobs and careers that we loved. So we were – in societies eyes – both successful.
But it didn’t feel like enough. We worked so hard, and both led teams we loved working with. Though it felt like we couldn’t prioritise time as a young family.
We couldn’t see our boys enough and it felt far closer to what in our eyes was deemed the rat race rather than societal success.
We had the feeling there was more to life than the one we were living now.
And so, the dream of something totally different – something crazy and brave – was sparked.
The next challenge was figuring out how to pull it off.
We originally left New Zealand for fulltime travel with a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old at the beginning of 2019.
Our plan was for a year of travel in Asia and the Middle East and after that, we figured we’d slot back into life as we knew it in New Zealand.
But travel changes you.
We were hooked on the learning and loved having the time together that we had so lacked at home in the rat race of normal life.
The next challenge was to figure out a way to keep on going so the journey didn’t have to end!
Fast forward to now and it’s well fair to say that off-the-beaten track travel is what appeals most to us as a family and ultimately, is what has inspired our continued travel lifestyle.
It’s six years later and we haven’t any plans of stopping yet.
The dream is to continue our travels and continue sharing our story to pay it forward as we too have been inspired by others before us.
Thanks for visiting and happy reading!