Tag Archives: moving

St. Kilda Bound in Melbourne, Australia

Quick catch-up because we are about to have a wildly busy week. We are moving into a new apartment on Wednesday and the shippers are coming to deliver all of the household items that arrived via shipping container from Europe last week. Whew!

It took several weeks of looking for an appropriately-sized apartment to rent and we had one extra requirement that most people don’t have — we needed a lock-up garage to safely store all of Mark’s work tools. Let’s be truthful, that’s practically impossible to find in the extremely popular inner Melbourne area that we were looking in! But I was persistent and finally found not only a groovy apartment with polished hardwood floors and LOADS of closets in a 1950s era apartment, but it also had the wish-list garage AND it was on the top floor so there is NO noise from neighbours walking around overhead. Hooray!!!

Livingroom

Sunny bedroom

Tiny 1950s kitchen with original cabinets!

The kitchen is going to need a LOT of refinement because it’s teeny-tiny and actually has all of the original 1950s upper and lower cabinets in place along with a grotty and very small refrigerator, but we’ll get there. Thank heavens we brought our brand new and energy efficient refrigerator with us from France. And we have the agent’s permission to make ‘refinements’ to the kitchen.

All in all, we’re just happy and grateful to have found 90% of what we were looking for — and we are in our first-choice neighbourhood with trams on our doorstep, good shopping nearby, the inner city is a mere 10 minutes by tram, and the beach is around the corner. Again — hooray!

More soon (I hope!).

Counting Down to Departure from Northern Hemisphere!

It’s now only ONE WEEK until our household goods get picked up by the moving company! I’ve spent my day filling out ‘Unaccompanied Goods’ forms for the Australian Customs folks, refining the inventory sheets so they know what is in every single box we have packed, getting specs online for our fridge-freezer to ship back to AU, and finding out what the coolant in that appliance contains (nothing negative, thank heavens!).

Australian Fridge Form

I was and HOPING to find some time to do photo editing this afternoon and I am SO far behind and my agencies in New York and London are awaiting images that should have been there already. Sheesh!

We spent the day at Hadrian’s Wall yesterday and in spite of the breathtaking cold, we had a wonderful time. That will be a future post full of pictures, but it might have to wait for awhile.

Back to work I go!

Ping-Ponging? Nope! Happily Back To Australia!

Have you ever heard the term ‘Ping Pong Poms’ and do you know the origin? It refers to people from Great Britain, commonly referred to around the world as ‘Poms’, who move to Australia for a new life and ping-pong right back to the UK because they find that it’s too much of a change for them or that Australia isn’t British enough for their tastes. They usually return to the northern hemisphere within 12 months or less.

So, in our own case, if we moved whole-heartedly to Europe from Australia over 2 years ago and, in spite of that previous commitment to a European life, are now returning to Australia — does that make us Ping Pong Aussies? Actually no — it’s a very happy choice and we are getting more and more excited with each day at this point.

I consider myself to be a boots-on-the-ground documentarian of the places and social conditions where we are living. Although I sometimes report on the glossy travelogue version of Europe, at other times you will read my take on the current day-to-day facts about Europe.

The reasons we came to this side of the world and that we love it here are all still valid — the visual beauty, the greenness, the history, the architecture. But it’s quite clear that Europe, including the UK, is unravelling financially and unless you are in banking, medicine, or property sales — if there is no way to make a decent living, you’d be in trouble in no time. We just spoke to a building contractor here in Newcastle about an hour ago and he said that 8-10 years ago he made 3-1/2 times what he does now each month. If we ever DO want to retire, we have to be sensible and go back to a place where we can start building the accounts back up, not continue to deplete them. We actually feel very blessed to HAVE options when so many people are trying to LEAVE the UK and emigrate to Australia or New Zealand. There are several television shows over here about how to do that!

France would have been our happy-heart choice here in Europe, but the tax changes and pension changes just blew that out of the water for us. There is simply no work here in the UK and even the people with jobs all feel quite insecure.

I was relieved to leave Australia in 2010 — I won’t lie about that — but not because I didn’t love it there. I wouldn’t have bothered getting Australian citizenship if I hadn’t truly loved that country and I would have just carried on being a legal resident the way I was in France. The rural lifestyle just wore us both out. It was much too much in a way that neither of us could have anticipated before we tried it. But gosh — we did love all of the people we met out there in Central Victoria who are now life-long friends to know as we get older.

I am glad that I never-ever departed from Australia with negative feelings about it because, after having a bit of a think about it and getting our heads wrapped around it, we have both realised that neither of us is having ANY issues with moving back in the end. And isn’t THAT a nice surprise! It’s as if going away has given us a better appreciation for the country and made us understand that it’s still a darned good lifestyle in Australia compared the austerity of Europe and the UK and the dreadful financial mess that is ever-present in the USA.

The best part of Australia to me is the part that is the most European — Melbourne! So Mark has agreed that even if we live in a shoebox sized house, he’ll do city living (thank God because I had enough of snakes, bushfires, and heat in the countryside the last time!), join a city cycling club, and let us have the freedom of just walking out the door and catch a tram to the market, a club, a museum, a cafe. He always turned up his nose at the idea of a more centralised city lifestyle in Melbourne or even when we were visiting Sydney but thankfully that has changed. Maybe we’ll eventually have a weekend cottage in the country? Maybe not. We’ll see.

Once we were actually on this side of the world, Mark finally got into the groove of that urban lifestyle choice in places like Berlin and Amsterdam and London. Those two months in London in 2011 showed him that cycling in the city can be quite interesting and visually stimulating in a different way to the bleached brown rolling hills of Victoria, Australia. When we actually lived full time in St. Girons in the south of France, he finally had his eyes opened to how cool it was to have your own wee manageable space in your home, but then the greater world of entertainment was right on your doorstep — literally — instead of it being a long and boring DRIVE to get to anything.

Our life in St. Girons has set the template for what we want to go back and find in Melbourne. But we wouldn’t have know THAT either unless we had left Australia for awhile.

So to answer the questions that have trickled in about how I REALLY feel about moving back to Australia and are we both happy about it –it’s all good, we’re fine with our decision, and as much as it seems like a shockingly abrupt turn-around to some people, we will not only manage, we will thrive! Mark is quite calm about moving back, I am quite calm about it, and we will relish every minute of this little 2-1/2 year adventure and know that it was the right thing to do AT THE TIME that we did it. Now it is the right time to go back.

Next up? The list making, re-packing, staging, reservations-making, booking of moving companies, and then getting ON THE PLANE. Wheeee!!!

Good Progress for Day 2 Back in UK

The movers were an hour late this morning and it took over 2 hours for the two drivers (and Mark!) to unload it all and fit it into our storage room like a puzzle full of box shaped pieces, but it looks like everything arrived from France unscathed. Hooray!

The storage building I had rented online was perfect and incredibly clean, we had a nice lunch in Norwich, and now we have new phone numbers today too.

Proceeding apace quite nicely!

More soon…

Safely Back in the UK

Wrapping up the last week of life in France was incredibly compressed. But I am happy to report that we are safely home in Norfolk at Mark’s parents’ house. What a trip back though! I thought the 10-plus hours of travelling on Friday was bad — on Saturday we did 12 hours.

We drove through a full day of torrential rain that the windshield wipers barely kept up with on Friday. And may I just say that spending just short of THREE HOURS in wall to wall traffic on the Paris ring road was not a happy experience! The next day we had to deal with a really scary hail and ice storm in northern France which turned to snow just before we got to Calais. There were lots of car accidents north of Paris and we were driving slowly to be sensible and safe.

Then due to the weather, the P&O Ferry sailed from Calais to Dover an hour late in gale force winds. Thank heavens for motion sickness pills! After that we had another three hours of driving from Dover up to Norfolk. There was just enough ice on the road up here that Mark skidded the car a bit a mere 1 km from his parents’ house. Whew!

Gosh I slept hard — and so did Mark. We’ve had a marvelous and restorative day so far, a scrumptious brunch out, my darling mother-in-law is cooking pork roast for dinner, and after the movers arrive tomorrow we’re going to start looking for a new van for driving on the UK side of the road.

I took some wonderful photos at a museum outside Paris yesterday and I will try to start posting those — and the other huge backlog of articles and photos from the last month — in the coming week. Be patient — we’re taking it a day at a time right now and trying to get quite a LOT accomplished in a very short time.

Life is good, we’re happy to be back, and we’ll keep everyone posted!

Out The Door We Go!

There have been quite a few up-close-and-personal moments with these objects below over the last 2 weeks. And frankly, I am exhausted! But the movers arrived today, everything went out the door smoothly, and we are tucked up in a hotel for the night with just the final cleaning to do tomorrow and turning in my wifi box before we can hand in the keys and hit the road.

Tape dispenser and packing tape in France

We’ve been very lucky. The previous movers who evaporated into thin air were replaced by what seems like a rather nice company. The car sold, the excess items sold, and last night the cooking stove sold. So we are taking absolutely NO superfluous things with us to England!

Tomorrow we’ll drive toward Paris and stop for the night up there. Then there is a museum we specifically want to see north of Paris and I’ll be reporting on that as soon as possible. On Saturday we take the ferry from Calais to Dover, on Sunday we rest at Mark’s parents’ house, and on Monday we meet the movers at the storage unit and put everything safely away for awhile.

Then in about a week after that, we’re off on an adventure to see parts of the UK that we have never visited. And hopefully within a few weeks of departure, we’ll know where we’d like to stop, settle, and buy another house. And you can be sure that I’ll be posting along the way whenever I have a stable internet connection.

Wish us luck — we’re off on the road again!

Leaving France In A Week. Yikes!

We’ve had some amazing blessings in the last few days and (Universe, are you listening?) they are VERY much appreciated and acknowledged. Now if we could just sell the 3 piece bathroom suite that we got in anticipation of renovating a house here in France (small sigh!) and sell the 6 month old gas cooking stove, we’d really be laughing!

After the dastardly movers cancelled with 9 days before the scheduled pick-up, I put the move back up on the AnyVan website in the UK and started taking bids again. I don’t know if they offer this sort of service in Australia, the USA, or Asia — but it’s a godsend for those of us living in Europe.

You put the details of your move online, list what you have, and then different moving companies compete for your job by submitting bids. They are dealing with the AnyVan website and you are quite safe because all they have is your user name — no address details and so forth.

Within 24 hours, new bids starting rolling in and many of them were quite a lot higher than our previous contract. But through some frank discussions of what we could and could not afford, we managed to get a proper registered moving company (not just a man and a van!) that is sending a full size moving truck down here with 2 drivers to pick up all of our things on the 30th — NEXT WEDNESDAY!

I sold my Peugeot last week to a couple from England who are still over there and they won’t be back in France until February. But we arranged to deliver the car to their village near Mirepoix and hand the paperwork and keys over to their charming neighbour Aidan. He was a simply wonderful surprise on an on-and-off sunny then overcast Sunday and we had several hours of stimulating conversation at his kitchen table. It’s a shame we didn’t meet before we were getting ready to leave the country — but I feel like we will stay in touch.

I’ve just secured a storage unit for us in Norfolk in an insured, clean, indoor building and not a damp and cold outdoor shipping container style lock-up. So we will feel very peaceful about leaving our things safely tucked up there whilst we visit Mark’s parents in Norfolk for a wee bit and then get on the road to the Midlands, Yorkshire, and perhaps on up to Scotland to decide where we would like to live and work next. It’s another adventure and you just know there will be lots of stories and photos along the way!

I have dozens of photos to share from our 3 day trip to Toulouse a week ago, but there is simply no time to do that right now. Photo editing is out — packing dozens of boxes is in — simple as that. And in between the sessions of packing, we are squeezing in last minute dinners, lunches, and drinks with our friends here in France that we will miss quite a lot.

All for now. The packing tape and rolls of bubble-wrap are singing to me!

A Wanderful Life

The Neverending Journey