Rachel was a bone-weary mother-of-two, running her own preschool out of their house and worrying herself sick about the toll her husband's work was having on him and their boys.

Tired of holding onto a life that no longer served them, they devised a way out.

"We decided together that in order to truly live life, we would have to create life by design and start building our way out of nine to five and towards a life on the road," Rachel said.

For two years, they saved and planned their road trip and, soon after the police force signed off on a year's leave without pay, they set out in a Jayco Expanda caravan and four-wheel drive. Along for the ride of a lifetime: their two young sons, Jett and Leni - and another on the way.

"Originally it was just to take off for one year, but I knew that once I got him into the lifestyle that he wouldn't want to go back," Rachel said.

Four years after setting out on their grand adventure, the Prouds barely recognise the desperately unhappy people they were back in Windang. They still work - selling essential oils via their online business The Free Change - but have vowed never to return to their old way of life. They are too content, too changed by their travels. Even if they wanted to, they would have a hard time convincing their three kids.

The youngest, Nedd, born shortly after the Prouds started travelling, is now four years old and has never known any other life. Jett, 13, and Leni, 10, adapted quickly to a transient lifestyle, travelling from park to park, and are in no hurry to set down roots. The bus is home.

About two years in, they upgraded to a coach, fully renovated by Clinton and decked out in Rachel's boho style. It's more spacious than the caravan and has a car trailer attached to the back for easy trips into town, as well as an annexe and storage room for a much-loved fire pit.

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Inside the vehicle, the boys have three drawers for their clothing and two little shelves above their bed for their personal belongings - a record player, records, Tech Decks, stickers and tools for teenager Jett; books, art supplies and a set of Rubik's cubes for the puzzle-obsessed Leni; toys for Nedd - and they each have a curtain that closes across their bed for privacy.

As her sons learn just how little you need to have a fulfilling life, Rachel has been absorbing that lesson alongside them.

"I was the epitome of materialistic and it has been the most interesting journey for me to look at the stuff I used to feel like I needed to be happy and fulfilled in my life and to know that nowadays if we need something, the 'needs versus wants' is very front and centre in how we approach life," she said.

"It feels really good and energetic and free to be out of that habit of overconsumption, which was one of the things that used to get me down - that cycle of spending and dependency on going to the shops, buying more, decorating the house and redecorating it next week.

"When you're living on the road, it takes a little while to peel back the layers of all that. You don't just suddenly not have those urges, but you realise you're perfectly fine without it - as long as you have your necessities - food, water, shelter, warmth and love."

They have rules to prevent the accumulation of stuff - 'one in, one out' when it comes to toys, while everything else carried onto the bus must have two uses in order to keep such small confines liveable.

Sometimes the boys will need a break from each other, and they have permission to take a breather whenever they need it.

"They know when they're needing space - that might look like their curtain closed, Jett will put on his earphones, or they'll go for a skate, a bike ride or lay out in the hammock," Rachel said.

But she says, for the most part, the boys get along well and enjoy being in such close proximity to each other.

"We call it the hallway shuffle, there's just one big long hallway and we're just always around each other," she said. "We can manoeuvre about, I could be cooking, or Clinton could be cooking, Nedd's building a train track under our feet, Leni's over here on his keyboard and Jett's over there with his Tech Decks.

"Someone looking in might think that's chaotic, but for us we've got heaps of room."

As for home schooling (Rachel calls it 'life schooling'), the Prouds are not trying to mimic a classroom.

"Our day is different every day but the basic principles remain - it's self-led, our children have their interests and we expand on those," Rachel said.

"Maths and English are always part of their lessons, but how we do that differs slightly based on their interests.

"Jett has just finished a 10-week course on human biology, and that was an online course with a teacher from Los Angeles. Leni is studying algorithms for Rubik's cubing and music - these are things I don't get to decide for them."

The bus life is not for everyone, plenty have tried and failed, but Rachel believes it's because they go into it thinking it's a holiday rather than a complete overhaul of their lives and values.

"We've met quite a few people who have tried to live long-term on the road and say 'I can't cope, we're on our way home now'," she said. "They've tried for two or three months, the kids are having tantrums and they're done. The people who have gotten through that stage recognise we're growing into this lifestyle, unbecoming everything the world taught us we had to be - and recognising that there's no time frame to that.

The Prouds will head back to the Illawarra for Christmas, to reunite with friends and family, before driving off into the sunset, new adventures awaiting them.

"Our goal and our end-game is to get a hundred acres of land and create an environment off-grid where people can detach from all the expectations of society and return to each other. But we'll still travel six months of the year."

"Originally, we rented out the house and we moved into the front end of my mum's house to save up enough money. That was part of the sacrifice of being able to build the foundations to be able to travel. There's this allusion that you just decide and it happens, and that people are just somehow lucky for it to happen to them. But there is so much planning that goes into this, especially if this is going to become a lifestyle as opposed to just a trip. We eventually sold our house in Windang and bought a new one while travelling that I share with my parents. We have the essential oil business, the Free Change, which is our predominant source of income - and on top of that we have an e-commerce business and that's ever evolving as well. We don't have those overheads that other people have."

"Clinton was still a police officer for that first year and was attending court via video link. Every time he appeared on a video link, his colleagues would comment on how different he looked. His hair was getting longer, he was getting a scruffier beard and he looked a lot happier, so it became more apparent that this lifestyle would be something we could continue beyond that first year. It wasn't an easy decision (to quit the police force), because he loves his job and he loves his role, but the reality was that he wanted to be with his family more and he had missed so much of that. He ended up recording a really nice message on his phone and he hopes to play that to his boys one day when they're older - why he chose them over his career because he'll never get this time back."

"The first year is about peeling back the layers, your social expectations of who you were in your local environment and society and your friendship groups - who are you without that? So there's that process happening as well as the materialistic side - what do I truly need to exist, how do we interact with each other? I laugh when I hear people say things like 'I would like to go travelling, I think it would really help my marriage'. And I'm like 'OMG, please'. It's like saying 'let's go have triplets, it will save our marriage'. It's not realistic. The realistic side is is that if you want to get to know who you really are and what you really need to happily coexist on this planet, go travelling with your family and discover it for yourself.

"The reality is that if there's an emotion that's bubbling, there's nowhere to hide. You actually have to address it, and that's been one of the greatest gifts for our children to see, as well that process of acknowledging how we're feeling, putting into place a really healthy response to that, and saying 'I might need to go and have some alone time, a cup of tea outside and catch my thoughts and then we can revisit this conversation again'. Jett is 13 and a lot of people think that at his age he would be the hardest to fit into this lifestyle, but he was actually just talking this morning about starting his own blog to try to help people understand why he chooses this lifestyle. He's not an average teenager, he has rewritten the book on how a teenager speaks and sounds."

"I had a lady say to me once, 'I can't wait to see how your children grow up, and if they become functioning members of society'. And I laughed. I said, 'That's the difference between you and me, I'm not waiting until my children finish Year 12 to decide if they're functioning members of society and successful people because they already are - and that's the mindset and legacy."

"In the mornings, the boys hop up they'll go out and make their own breakfast and their smoothies, and the day begins. They wake up on their own body clock which I think is important because sleep is very undervalued in this world. We won't really start formal schoolwork unless we've gone out and done something for the day. We'll often go out skateboarding, go for a walk and explore, or we'll go and get some energy out at the beach. Then it's usually the hour or two before lunch that they'll actually sit down and focus on their learning. Nothing is ever timed. We go back to the rule of 'as the sun goes down, you come home'. We see our childhood reflected in what they do, so they get to wander the caravan park street and go out and meet friends and have an ice-cream and spend hours and hours doing everything but nothing."

"When we had the caravan we would move every three or four days and that was based on whether we were either running out of nappies for the baby or supplies. Now with the bus, it's much slower. We've been where we currently are for a month and will stay another month. We've met a Steiner school teacher and we're paying her to come and teach Leni two hours a week. The longer you stay, the deeper the connections within that community become, which is another beautiful side to travel which we didn't have in that initial phase of just move, move, move. It was just like fleeting moments with people and now you've got sustained friendships."

"We have families reach out to us and say it's because of our version of travel that we had the courage to try it. They eventually go back to 'real life', but the reality is that they're forever changed as a result of what they learned when they were free. I still see it that they've accomplished their goals. They can go back to everyday life and they can slot back in, but they're forever blessed as a result of travelling. That's why we encourage it. It's not easy all the time, it's not Martinis on the beach all the time, but if you're willing to do the work and you understand the depth of beauty that can come as a result of backing yourself, you'll be forever changed."

Learn more at www.thefreechange.com.

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