Long before ELZWHERE existed, there was a paper map - the kind that lives in a glovebox, gets folded the wrong way more times than right, and ends up soft at the creases from handling.
I marked mine by hand, in pen, on a trip that took us through so much of this country. We started in Brisbane and from there covered a great deal of the east, down through South Australia, and up into the Northern Territory - we never quite made it west. We picked fruit along the way to pay for petrol and food, and somewhere between the rows and the long stretches of road, fell completely in love with this country.
That map still exists. The pen marks are still there.
I told my daughter, Natasha, those stories as she grew up - enough that the same love of the road found its way into her too. Years later, she set off on a journey of her own, with her husband and their two small children, and went looking for a map she could mark the way I'd marked mine. She couldn't find one she liked.
So she came to me and said, "Mum, you're a designer. Why don't you make one?"
We already had a design and print business on the Gold Coast - my partner Brendon and I - and the idea settled on us gently: why not create something like this, for people who love travelling as much as we do? So we began ELZWHERE, from scratch.
What we make now is what I wish I'd had back then: real maps, made to be marked, with proper navigation stickers in place of a biro running out of ink at the worst moment. Two generations, one habit of marking where we've been - now something other travellers can do too.