“I didn’t think he was serious, he jokes a lot, we had a single income, mortgage, two kids at that stage and they were five and three,” Rachel says of the initial discussions. “But he was serious so we turned that into a project and the only thing that our sponsors knew was Greg could take great photos, and I could write. We worked with Canon Australia for a number of years and all the big camping brands... we were one of the very early family travel bloggers and there wasn’t really anyone sort of in that space, with families, doing it fairly long term. We used to spend two months out of every year on the road and I think after our first big trip, we decided Canberra was getting a bit too big a city for us, so we started looking around, half-heartedly thinking maybe Perth, maybe Wellington in New Zealand. But then we came to Tassie and [we knew] it is where we belong. “The idea was Greg wanted to do photo tours and originally when we were on our trip, I was actually applying for jobs. I had a couple of interviews while we were still traveling but as soon as we went back to the mainland, the interviews dried up, which is a common story. People want people who are here in Tassie. We changed tack and that’s when Greg said he’d love to do photographic tours. For that we wanted to be about an hour away from an airport but have a major capital city
close by as well. So I started looking at the businesses that were on the market, and at that stage things had sat on the market for quite a long time, nothing was moving quickly. When we came to Mt Field we didn’t actually know that the cafe was still for sale at that stage, but we all loved Mt Field for different reasons. “Greg loved it because the photography was amazing. The kids loved it, because there were other kids in the campground that they could play with and it had just that great atmosphere. And I loved it because everyone else was happy and I could just relax. We would normally stay one or two nights in most of our locations and we ended up staying five nights because we all enjoyed it so much. So when I actually saw that the cafe was for sale, that was it. It ticked every single box, we’d already been there, we had that connection already.” A year into running Waterfalls Café the need for accommodation options in the region became apparent to Rachel, leading to the retreat concept which had stalled for so long until the recent unveiling. A further 12 units and conference centre are now in the pipeline, as well as five luxury retreats and two family retreats a little further down the track. While excited about the whole project vision, it is the conference
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