So now eight months in Australia have passed.
I got to be here for my maternal Grandmother’s 94th birthday,
Christmas and NYE, my cousin’s wedding and lots of other fun events. It
was a revolving door of visitors through the spring and summer season which
included friends from both Seattle and Steamboat. This was a great excuse for
lots of visits to my Grandmother’s beach shack on Bruny Island for lazy days of
reading, beach walking, barbeques, campfires and the discovery of the best
scones I’ve ever tasted, served at a cafe on the island.
There have also been some great walks at
places like the beautiful Mt Field National Park, camping at Narawntapu
National Park where I got to get up close and personal with wild wombats who
cast squinty and suspicious glances at me crawling up to them on all fours
while they grazed, a drive to the most southern point in Australia and many
other enjoyable adventures.
In amongst these happenings Laura and I also
managed to plan our next overseas adventure. Originally, when we arrived back
from the States our plan was to head over to New Zealand for the winter to work
and ski at a resort there (which you can see was the plan when I wrote the last post). But the more we thought about it the more we shared
the feeling that that plan just wasn’t quite ‘gelling’. Something just didn’t
feel right about it. Not that we don’t want to go to New Zealand and do a ski
season there, the whole place sounds amazing and I’m sure I’m going to love it
when I make it there, but we don’t need a working visa to go there (such is our
fortunate position as Australian citizens) and Laura is running out of time to
get working visas. I myself am also no spring chicken in the world of visas,
the cut-off age of thirty is coming for us both with alarming rapidity. So what
would be a better plan? We asked ourselves one lazy, late morning
chain-drinking cups of tea in our bathrobes. “You know what we should really
do?” I said “Really we should move to the U.K. and do the working visa there” “Yes!” Laura said. So that’s what we’re
doing. We spent the rest of that day hashing out the general details and the
rest is history.
Hahahaaa! I laugh at my own past naive optimism
which actually did think it would be that simple! Because really that was just
the beginning of a long, expensive, convoluted process of unexpected passport
renewal and online visa application wrestling which has only now, six months
later, really come together. The process even got its own separate blog post
written about it which I will maybe post here one day, possibly when I’m eighty-five,
given my track record. But now the bureaucratic paperwork side is shored up (almost...
Laura’s visa arrived yesterday, if I’m lucky mine will be here in two weeks) there
comes the bit where we have to actually travel to the U.K. and find jobs and a
place to live and all that. Which anyone who read my post about our arrival in
Steamboat will know can be a harrowing affair of living on the edge of destitution
and crazed optimism. Crazed optimism generally taking the form of smiling
brightly or even laughing hysterically through bewildered tears while sobbing “it’s
all going to be just fine I’m sure of it!” But I’m getting ahead of myself. Right
now I’m pretty much just excited! Time for something startlingly new!
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