Yearly Archives: 2009

We’ve found our new home! The whole thing went infinitely more smoothly than we expected — it was the second motorhome we looked at, too. In Birmingham (specifically, Solihull), we stayed with Keith and Olga, my great aunt and uncle, and met Trevor and Jane, my…first cousin, once removed, according to Yahoo answers, and her husband. They are fulltime motorhomers … Continue reading

With a few days of fun and frivolity over and done with, it’s time to knuckle down and get to work finding our new home. This is made much easier with our mobile broadband, and we’re spending most of our time trawling eBay, Gumtree and one or two other forums for likely motorhomes. We moved on from Islington, and went … Continue reading

Notes on mobile broadband options for the countries we visit

The English appear to be very funny about offering contracts — even very short ones, like a month — to anyone who hasn’t been living in the UK for less than 3 years. Consequently, all of the contract options were unavailable to us, so prepaid was the only route possible. 3 This is who we’re with in UK. 3 are … Continue reading

Waking up the morning after we arrived at Tiff’s place in Islington, I was feeling pretty sick, so we were working with the theory that I was going to be absolutely useless. This really sucked, because it was Katherine’s birthday, and the last thing we wanted to do was be stuck inside while I sneezed, wheezed and coughed my way … Continue reading

For the first few days of our new little adventure, we had decided to stay in a nice B&B. Katherine spend a good deal of time researching, and came up with 30 King Henry’s Road. This turned out to be an absolutely brilliant find, as the B&B, a beautiful four-storey mansionesque house with heaps of character, was located in one … Continue reading

After all that preparation and anticipation, the time’s finally arrived to leave this fair land of ours and join the apparent majority of Australia’s young adult population in London (side note: At least four people we know are in London or will be within a couple weeks of us, and more are coming shortly after)! A surprisingly frenetic final evening’s … Continue reading

One day left. Not tomorrow morning, but the morning after that, we’re getting on a plane to re-invent our lives. We are both getting stabs of fear when we think about it, but that’s probably a sign we’re doing the right thing. As Katherine said earlier, the antidote is to think about the alternative We’ve spent the last week meeting … Continue reading

Given that my productivity, writing quality and patience have fallen away, and that it’s just a few weeks until we’re off, I’ve come to the fairly delightful conclusion that the best course is to stop writing for a while and focus on preparation for our departure, plus a certain amount of chilling out! Along with the decision, I realised that … Continue reading

My partner Katherine has 5 days left, before she’s a free agent. This thing is really happening! Meanwhile, my PhD supervisor has doubts about our June 25 deadline. Here’s hoping I prove him wrong.

My mother, who has been spectacularly helpful in offering advice and helping to kick ideas around has done some research for us on how to manage money while we’re travelling. It turns out that, almost universally, banks are charging exorbitant fees to access money internationally – the 2% ‘currency conversion’ fee is one particularly common one, which can be a … Continue reading