goingau

well we're out here. you no longer get the immigration stamp in your passport "bummer". flight was good no problems there even with three childern booked car hire the day we left and ended up with a xr6 just enough room for 2 large bags and two small bags. drove out of sydney after a few wrong turns and up the m1.

old.sparkles

Safe travels - glad everything is all good so far

carolinephillips

Welcome to Australia!!


Now you need to change your location.....

goingau

we have been checking out the surrounding areas we will be looking at for living near the local school, so we have done abit of a drive by today.

in the common sense of keeping three little kids happy and amused, a couple of days ago we went to australia zoo. caught the croc show and had a good look round. that night we were blessed with early bedtime as they were worn out.

driving is a bit strange everyone sticks to the top of the speed limit and doesn't want to move/accelerate/slow down to let people join the M1???

goingau

we back.
we still like it there so will be going back...
got a little lost getting out of sydney went south instead of north.

old.sparkles

Only getting lost once isn't bad

Hope you all had a great time - what did you get to see in the end?

goingau

not a lot i'm afraid, just as we got out of sydney our children fell asleep. my OH navigation was a little off so we missed the pie shop at heatherbrae, so stopped a little later to get a pie at a servo and fuel, our children were so deep in sleep they wouldn't wake up so we decided to push on. swapping drivers on the way, they had lots of sleep they woke up once for rest area stop and i got them to run up and down a little bit. later on we stopped for a nap ourselves in at a rest stop seemed like minutes but it was more like an hour started to look for a motel and managed to miss most (i blame poor signs on the highway or us )we were getting so tired. thankfully we found one on the main road in macksvillie. so we saw the big banana, sugar cane fields, lots of sugar cane fields and some beautiful country side.

goingau

on a plus point next day we got to our relies just outside bryon. on the way to that more sugar cane fields, camels in the fields, banana groves, massive road works and more beautiful scenery as we drove over the mountains to get to our relies. once there we saw whales just of the beach and our girls just played in the ocean. before evening when we went to bryon fro a fish and chip supper...

goingau

house clearance/tidy is going well, slow but well.
christmas is over so time to repaint house as i'm sure time will fly and we will soon be at d-day (departure day).
my thoughts are rerunning our validation trip and the drive from nsw to qld. having done it wrong, i would like to do it right so i'm thinking of splitting the trip over three days. maybe staying over night in sydney after landing and then cruising up to bryon before brisbane. perhaps doing a maxium of four hours a day driving. with stops every hour so the children don't just sleep their way through, as with hindsight that was just wrong. as we all got a bit ratty.

so thrifty car hire was great, no extras wacked on at the end of the hire. had an xr6 at the time boot space was a bit limited. so this time something bigger camper maybe, or buy something in sydney to drive up and use from there.

carolinephillips

Good luck with all the cleaning/painting/sorting out.
Stopping in Sydney overnight is a good idea, especially with kids. Also taking the journey more slowly. There are lots of interesting places to stop on the way, and give the kids a chance to let off steam.

goingau

right after clearing out so of the junk we have collected over the years, we are still left with much more .
we are going to rent our house out so those little things that have been 'i'll get round to doing that later' are now need to do that right now. hence two replacement interior doors (old doors being over half glass with one pane missing and the other being the cats scratch post).
we have a list of what we will take and have decided that everything else will be sold or binned.
getting quotes for shipping as well now we have a final list for whats going (amazing how much you accumulate).


**we have booked flights **

now the deadline is fixed in place

old.sparkles

Not long left - everything goes smoothly

goingau

yes that's true

used to have lots of time, now down to a couple of months

carolinephillips

woohoo! Be ruthless with your clutter.

Molly Coddle

We are renting our house out too, luckily we have a family member who wants to live in it so that's a bonus, as he's extremely tidy, organised and clean.

We haven't booked our flights yet though as we don't even know where in Australia we are going talk about unorganised. God help us!

I am in the process of de-cluttering too, I never realised we had so much shit! You're right about how much you accumulate. I think we might need a skip. Lol


Are you following a list of to do's? And ticking off as you go, or just along with the flow ( like us ) and hoping it all works out?

I don't know about you but my head feels like it's ready to blow up, there's so much to think about.


Anyway good luck with it all.