About

Enjoying a Pina Colada on the Croatian island of Brac, while the kids played on the waterslide!

 

 

Hi, I’m Natalie, and I’m the creator of Mamma Loves Travel.

A little about myself…

I’m a mother of 3 girls aged 11, 7 and 5 and along with my husband and our dog, we live in Melbourne’s south-west, in one of Australia’s fastest growing suburbs where the kids outnumber the adults, and the tight-knit community is lobbying to turn our suburb into its own country (ahem!).

I’m a first generation Australian, with both my parents born in Croatia and emigrating to Australia in the late 1960s. While my friends ate Vegemite and cheese sandwiches at school, I was the girl with the salami sandwiches or the leftover homemade cevapcici from the previous night’s dinner, before cevapcici could ever be found in a local supermarket meat section! I spent 11 years studying the Croatian language every Saturday morning.

Fast forward to when I turned 18, and I decided to start exploring my own country with various solo trips to places such as Ayers Rock, the Gold Coast, Fraser Island, Noosa, Sydney, Perth and Fremantle.

At age 21, I decided to do the typical “Aussie backpacker working in London” stint, where I worked for Westminster Council for several months and afterwards doing a crazy 3 week camping trip around Europe with Contiki (yeah, I camped with strangers for 3 weeks!) before living and travelling around Croatia for 5 months.

My husband Mark was born in Australia to a Dutch father and a mother with part English-part Italian heritage.

When we first met, we would spend weekends travelling around our state of Victoria, on various camping trips which usually revolved around his hobby of fishing and my love of hiking. Together we explored places in Victoria such as the Grampians, Great Ocean Road (at least once a month we would stay in Torquay), Bright, Yarrawonga/Mulwala, Daylesford, Lake Eildon and many more.

In 2002, we backpacked around Europe together for 6 weeks, visiting his relatives in the Netherlands, my relatives in Croatia and also spending some time in Paris and the beautiful French Alps in the town of Chamonix.

We also travelled around Tasmania for two weeks for our honeymoon, hiking and yes, fishing!

Once our family started growing, we found ourselves continuing to explore our own state until 2014 when we took our first family holiday interstate to Queensland’s Gold Coast. After this successful trip, we thought about taking the tribe overseas.

And so in May 2015, we embarked on a 5 week adventure around Europe with our daughters!

But now we are back to reality, to a cold Melbourne, looking through photos and reminiscing about our wonderful time.

But back to Mamma Loves Travel…

I created MLT in April 2015 after coming to the end of my 10 year banking and finance career, and being in a lull-moment, I decided to work on something that I have a passion for: travelling and sharing my travel knowledge with others.

My aim is to share tips, advice and information with busy parents about anything related to family travel, to help them create a memorable family travel experience.

So no matter whether you are planning a short weekend getaway or a year long adventure; whether you are camping, staying in a five-star hotel or at a farm stay; whether you are going on a cruise or visiting family, Mamma Loves Travel is available to make family travel easier.

So let’s begin this journey together and see where it takes us!

Thanks for stopping by.

 

Natalie

 

 

1 thought on “About”

  1. Hi Natalie,

    We at Moving2OZ love your articles. Especially your travel tips. I was wondering if you might be interested in featuring as a guest blogger on Moving2Oz.net?

    Hope to hear from you.
    All the best from the Moving 2 Oz Team.

    Reply

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