Then more things happened which I also neglected to write about...

So now eight months in Australia have passed. I got to be here for my maternal Grandmother’s 94^th 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!