Couple on the road with kids to save money

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Couple on the road with kids to save money

Liz and Steve Evans have gone from being stuck in the daily grind to living a life of adventure in the space of a year and are unearthing gemstones along the way to pay for it.

The Sunshine Coast couple's lifelong dream to caravan with their kids in Australia rose when Mr Evans's work in the building industry became more challenging last year.

It was either now or you've got to wait 15 to 20 years until they all finish school and leave home and run away, Mr Evans said.

We have decided now - why not? They packed a 6 metre caravan and stuffed the rest of their life into storage boxes, pulled their children Amelia and Henry out of school and hit the road as unemployed full-time travellers. The couple admitted it was terrifying to drive away from their home with only a rough plan of what was going to happen next.

They soon came up with an unusual method to fund their adventure: gem fossicking.

Mr Evans inherited a love of fossicking from his father, who used to drive 36 hours from Sydney to the central Queensland gemfields chasing that elusive glint in the dirt.

The gemfields are one of the largest sapphire-rich areas in the world, about 900 kilometres north-west of Brisbane, near Emerald in the Central Highlands.

Mr Evans said we used to do the trip once, maybe twice a year.

It was just a family destination. Over the years, Mr Evans has collected a collection of beautiful gems that he was saving as a retirement nest egg.

They decided that you're never guaranteed tomorrow, so let's do it today and opened an online gem shop.

The sales are helping to fund their extended road trip.

The family shares its tricks with followers online, from digging buckets and examining the wash to grading and cutting the sapphires they find.

Amelia, 7, and Henry, 4, are already in love with fossicking, proudly displaying the sapphires they've found and making pocket money through selling some.

They've learned how to grade stones and get them cut, skills that their father believes can't be replicated in a classroom.

Although sapphires are famous for their deep blue hue, Mr Evans said sapphires basically come in every single colour of the rainbow. Every single one of them has their own personality, he said.

Some of the stones are worth thousands of dollars, and the bonus is that they are worth thousands of dollars.

There's a saying: you don't find sapphires, you earn them, Mr Evans said.

It's true that it's a lot of hard digging and stuff like that and it's not like shovelling sand.

There are some I wouldn't sell but I've got quite a few in the collection so it's time to let a few go. The Evans have been in the gemfields area for almost two months after they made their way south to New South Wales and Victoria and back up north.

They plan to spend a few more weeks fossicking before they hit the road again, following the trail of other known fossick regions and learning how to mine for opals and zircons along the way.

They've been on the road for nine months and are in no hurry to return to normal life.

It wasn't until two to three months into the trip that I started to relax and go, 'Oh my God, this is awesome, we should have done this ages ago', Ms Evans said.

Ms Evans said she could see the benefits of her nomadic experience in her two children.

She said it's nice to be able to have that time as a family.

You get that guilt of not having enough time to spend together and this has been a dream come true in that regard.