A good weekend

Sunday turned out to be a nice day (for a change) so it was time to do a bit of exploring, and off we headed inland towards the Serpentine National Park.

Along the way we drove through some beautiful rolling, and surprisingly green, countryside. An inpromtu coffee stop along the way brought a very welcome, very lush, but very expensive sticky date cake, and then a little while later we paid our $10 to enter the park.

I'm not sure why I was surprised to see kangaroos hopping happily about the picnic area, but I was. I had just not been expecting to see any, but it was a nice day, and they are obviously used to foraging around the picnic areas, and posing for photographs.





The main attraction on this trip were the Serpentine Falls, a large waterfall which attracts hordes of people to swim in the pool at it's feet. There was no swimming to be had today though - we have had so much rain that the falls were in full flow, making any attempt to swim in the water below too dangerous. An impressive sight, and an impressive noise as goodness knows how many gallons per second poured over. It was also reassuring to see so much water heading towards the regions dams to top them up a little before summer arrives.



We then pottered around a bit, and spotted our first wild emus - two in a field by the road, and two which crossed the road in front of us a short while later. I spent a happy few minutes stalking one of these emus trying to get a picture, but got myself a wet foot too when I misjudged the stream I tried to jump over!



A little more pottering around through a more traditional Australia brought us to Dwellingup for tea (bacon and egg burger for me which was slices of bacon and a fried egg on a bap with salad - no actual burgers involved at all!). And then home to do some initial planning for an upcoming 10 day road trip.



And Saturday? Well, that involved the football and once again, please can we not mention the football? :-(

Cheryl xx

Close encounters of the eight-legged kind

Redbacks - infamous and notorious spiders of the kind that linger underneath things (most famously the dunny in the days when the toilet was in a little shed down the garden).

Spiders of the kind that can kill with one bite, though to be honest they can only kill with one bite if you are hyper allergic to the venom. Most likely you will need a trip to casualty, be in pain and feel sick should you get bitten. But you don't want to have to get bitten to find out whether you're the trip to casualty and feel a bit sick and sore for a while kind of person, or the hyper allergic kind of person.

So, you can imagine our reaction when one of the little dears crawled out from the gas fire in the front room.

This gas fire has been kindly lent to us by friends, and had been sat in their garage for a while, quietly gathering dust, and as it turned out, Redbacks.

Anway, there was a bit of jumping about and 'get that thing out of here' from me, the application of a fair amount of Mortein (bug killer) and the Redback left the house in the sort of state that meant it wasn't going to be bothering anyone ever again.

A potential calamity avoided, though I now have a guilt complex for hastening the spider to the end of its life quite so quickly??

Just don't tell Grandma, ok? Or Emma..... Or Tom......

Cheryl x

The furniture has arrived!

Yes, rolled up at 11am (ish) today - two very cheerful and helpful young men. Very careful. I was a bit worried about the vinyl flooring which was only laid yesterday, but all was well.

And what a difference it makes. It may still be in a bit of a muddle, and there may be boxes everywhere, but it makes you feel so good to have your own stuff around. It is beginning to look like home now.

A bit like Christmas too, especially those boxes we didn't pack ourselves. Everything is wrapped, and you pull things out, have a feel to see if you can guess what it is, and then think 'oh yeah, wow, I forgot about that' when it appears out of the paper. Some of the boxes are full of styrofoam bits, so delving in there is like delving into a luck dip bin!

I expected there to have been casualties - no matter how carefully things are wrapped they are going on a ship halfway around the world, and it seems a miracle to me that things arrive at all, let alone in one piece. So far the only broken item is the microwave, but it was insured so that will soon be sorted.

There is the mystery over the washing machine however. Darran nearly had it plumbed in before the fact that the plug had been taken off it alerted him to the fact that it wasn't actually ours. So, who does have ours, and who's have we got??

Typically the office is closed for the weekend, so we will have to wait until Monday to work that one out!

In the meantime, there is unpacking to be done, and more surprises to unearth (albeit of things that we own but can't remember after 2 months).

Cheryl xx

Bringing it all up to date

It's been hard to keep the blog running. Internet access was limited for the first few weeks, and now we have it at home there has been a lot of sorting and catching up to do.

Things should calm down a little now, so I thought I would bring things up to date briefly, and then anything that we've done that deserves a post of its own I'll add later.

So, we landed, and the first couple of days were spent in Perth getting over the jetlag. We would have liked to have got tickets for the West Coast Eagles vs Fremantle Aussie rules football game, but it was a derby, and tickets sold out straight away. We had to content ourselves with watching some of the game on the screens in one of the food courts! Fremantle (who we now officially support), very surprisingly it turned out, won.

After a couple of days of mooching about we caught the train and headed down to Secret Harbour, south of the city, to stay with friends whilst we found somewhere to live. And once there is was straight down the beach to do a bit of fishing, and to watch the sunsets and dolphins.

The main job really was to find somewhere to rent - an interesting process. You drive past the houses you're interested in to have a look, and then contact the letting agent, who lets you know when the next open house will be. You duly turn up at the open house (it is open for just 15 minutes) and find yourself viewing it with everyone else who is interested. So you wander around eyeing the house up, and eyeing each other up, deciding whether to put in an application for it or not. We applied for 5 houses, not sure how long it would be before we got one, and then were offered the first one (which we took), and then another...

Anyway, more details on the house to follow, but for now the main things to know are that has plenty of room for visitors, and is a 4 minute car drive to the beach :-)

We moved in, all 4 suitcases and ourselves, and set about sorting out the essentials - a few pots and pans and things to put us on until the furniture arrived. Our 2-piece suite is currently two $10 plastic garden chairs from Bunnings (like B&Q, only better). A four bedroom house is very empty when you have no furniture, however we have since added a table and chairs and a computer desk! We have a cheap and cheerful radio and CD player (and you can tell it's cheap and cheerful!) and a small, yellow, borrowed Simpson's tv.

The work situation didn't pan out quite as planned for Daz, but he is now working as a Tap Doctor, driving around in a van with a 3' tap on the top. Which he loves......... He'll be doing that for the next 6 weeks, and then it is back to college, to do a servicing course.

As well as work and house stuff, there has been time for some more fun activities - a trip to Penguin Island, a tootle down the road to Bunbury, into the city to see The Living End (Australia's answer to Green Day), bike rides, and just taking in the sunsets and the dolphins.

I'll post more about these later, but for now the two important bits are that Daz is working and we've found a house.

Just don't mention the football..........

Cheryl x

Before we went - a quick belated update

Just a quick update on what happened before we left, and then I will get on to posting about what we have been up to since we have been here!

So before we left, there were:

...leaving do's - lots of them. Work do's, meals out and coffees, leaving do's with friends, leaving do's with family. Most of them nice sedate affairs, including my leaving do with my friends and family in Worksop, and at least one was not quite so sedate. The photos from Darran's leaving do in Stoke can be found at:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=104633&id=794453437&l=287cd17c0b

And there were tears, lots of tears (mine, I should add!).

Then it was time to box and pack everything up. Which nearly resulted in Darran catching the plane on his own. There were a few strong words and strops, it being quite a stressful thing this packing up a life and taking it the other side of the world, and him deciding he couldn't pack boxes......

Still, eventually, and with the help of the professional removals guys, off it all went in the back of a lorry, ready to be loaded onto a container and on to a ship, for us to see sometime in the next three months....

Then it was off for a week away with my parents to Norfolk - a bit of family bonding before the big move, leaving Daz to decorate and titivate the house prior to us handing it back to the landlord.

Then came the last minute goodbyes to those especially close friends and of course, family. Cue more tears. It is so hard to leave such good friends and much loved family behind. And because you are leaving them behind and having to say goodbye, they are even nicer than ever, which makes it all that much harder. Cue even more tears.

And then off to Heathrow to catch a plane to start a new life somewhere else 24 hours later.......

Next installment in our new adventrue to follow very shortly!


Cheryl xx

Last UK hair cut!

A good while ago now, my hairdresser Sally cheerfully announced that I was four haircuts away from emigrating. It was a bit of a shock at the time, however since then it has pretty much been the timeline I've been working to.

Slightly odd I know, but a haircut has become a benchmark against which to measure time and progress.

So today was the last of those four - purposely arranged to be done just before I went so it is all neat and tidy with a fresh colour and now I don't have to worry about it for a few weeks. It felt like a major event. It was a major event.

I have been trying to persuade Sally to come with me. She is, without a doubt, the best hairdresser I've ever had, patiently helping me to transform my hair from very short to longish. And totally refusing to cut a fringe back until it is the length I really want it (not that I know the answer to that one), about which, as much as I huff and puff, she is probably right.

One thing I am not looking forward to is trying to find a hairdresser in Australia anywhere nearly as good as Sally. I have heard it could be difficult.

Perhaps I should kidnap her..........

Cheryl x