Welcome to The Camelid Castle blog. I’m Nicole, most people call me Nic.  I’m a married 40-something mum to 3 adorable little kids (Astrid, Søren and Zinnia), we live in often cold, regularly scorching, and usually sunny Canberra, Australia.

I love kids, coffee, dessert (French pastries anyone?), animals, flowers, baking, throwing huge birthday parties, traveling the globe and taking photos.  Lots of photos! I love to take lots of photos of all those things I love…….

I don’t appear in too many of the photos, I’m usually behind the camera! Every now and then I try to jump in, here I am in the Austrian Alps in January 2016!

I started this blog back in 2012 so I could share my many photos (I have a bit of a habit) and some of our adventures traveling around the world with kid/s in tow!

I first developed an interest in photography back in 2007, when I hijacked my husband’s new DSLR and figured I’d better learn how to use it.  The hobby grew when I could no longer work in my former job in the Federal Public Service due to a chronic migraine condition and had some time on my hands.  I started out taking lots of photos of my crazy animals and the garden and gradually improved my photography. Once Astrid arrived in 2011, I had a new and fascinating subject to chase with my camera and thousands more photos.  Rather than let all my photos sit on my hard drive I figured I’d share them on a blog for friends and family, and it was also a good motivator to improve my photography further!

Why is this blog called The Camelid Castle? Well we have 2 alpacas (camelids) who live in our backyard. Their names are Inti and Chimu and they are not your average backyard pets, but pretty awesome and rather well-known around our area. We walk them around our suburb and our kids think it’s pretty normal to have a couple of alpacas sleep next to their bedroom windows!  We also have the more standard pets of cats (Mulder & Scully), tropical fish ….. and a stray pigeon who hangs around.  A bit of a menagerie.

Since I started the blog I’ve loved sharing our travel tales, adventures and copious travel photos. Over the past several years we’ve had some pretty fabulous adventures and made some amazing memories, and I love that people can come along on our trips via the blog posts.  When planning trips with little kids it’s hard to find lots of useful information about traveling with young children. We’ve found other travel blogs a fantastic resource, especially those who do lots of travel with kids.

Travel photography has become somewhat of a time-consuming passion, but it’s filled our walls with many amazing photos and our coffee table with photo books of our adventures.  I also regularly post some of my favourite travel pics on Instagram as camelidcastle.

When I’m not keeping my kids and animals alive and traveling all over the globe, I still love to take photos of everything and anything.  Many eventually appear on this blog. It’s always fun to take photos of other families and cute kids, you can check my recent work in the portfolio section above.  If you or your family would like me to photograph you, you can contact me at: nicole@camelidcastle.hups.net

I hope you enjoy some of the pictures and stories on The Camelid Castle.  I love nothing more than sharing my photos and adventures with people!