Tag Archives: relocating

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!).

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!

Life Changes, Life Planning, & Leaving France

Saying goodbye to France was something that we had not considered when we moved here last year, settled in, bought furniture and appliances, and began to make friends. But recent changes in the taxation structure since the election of Francois Hollande as President of France, the bureaucratic quagmire that all of us who move to France are forced to endure, pension issues, and several other boulders in the road that frequent readers of this site will already be acquainted with, have made this a place where we no longer wish to invest our emotional energy or our money. We are moving on after 10 months here in the South of France — with regret — but the decision has now been made and we are in the process of sorting out our last few weeks here in St. Girons.

And where are we going next? Well, to be truthful, we aren’t certain! We are flinging ourselves into the arms of the angels again, waiting to see where feels right, and then trusting that our choice is a good one. Our furniture and 100-plus boxes are being picked up in 2 and 1/2 weeks and taken to England to go back into storage. But then the fun begins as we go back on the road for awhile and we look for someplace to settle down. Living out of a suitcase wore us out after a year the last time and after spending almost 9 months in Normandy, we stopped moving in St. Girons. Who knows where we will be when we send for the household goods the next time!

A quiet moment between two women visitors at MACBA, the contemporary art & design museum in Barcelona, Spain.

The next few months should be very ‘interesting’ and we’ll need to be flexible. There is an unfolding book about life in France as an expat and I’ve even written the introduction chapter — but we’ll discuss that in another article.

Right now we are making lists of things to do, notifying the utility company, and packing-packing-packing. (again!)

Stay tuned as we find our feet on shifting sands!

Short break while we do set-ups

You may have noticed that a week has gone by since my last post from Amsterdam. Everything is fine, but I’m taking a few days off from posting for some necessary ‘housekeeping’ chores.

We sailed from the Netherlands to England on a lovely (and smooth!) night passage and are now living temporarily in a small village in Norfolk. The countryside is glorious (pictures coming soon!), the house is huge and comfortable, and we’re getting rather used to the daily gray skies and drizzle, drizzle, drizzle that is the norm for an England winter.

This past week has been eaten up with looking for and finally purchasing a car, setting up bank accounts, getting registered with a local doctor, and other unavoidable settling-in tasks like stocking the house with groceries and figuring out how to use the washing machine.

It has been an interesting learning curve — and I’ll be back to posting in a few days!

A Wanderful Life

The Neverending Journey