Defining your New Normal

Finding work isn’t always as easy as you think

Having a plan for where your income will come from, after you move to live…

Week 9 — Some of the perils of living overseas

Keeping in touch with friends and family ‘back home’

Technology is a wonderful thing. How wonderful, most of the younger generation will not really appreciate. When I first came travelling to Australia, in June of 1994…

Arriving in France, and how to get there!

Fast forward a few months from my last chapter to New Years Day 2015. It was 4 degrees outside, we had a hundred unopened boxes due to arrive the following day in 2 vans but we’d made it, we were finally French residents.

Week 8 – Travel

I have loved travel for most of my life. And when I say travel, I don’t mean holidays. I mean what I would call real travel. Not cocooned in some 5 star hotel, whilst the locals can’t afford food and drink. Not soothed by air conditioning when the locals live in temperatures that could cook an egg. And not…

How we decided where we wanted to live!

We’d already tried living in France for 3 months back in 2011, we loved the place, we loved the climate, the people, the chilledness (not sure if that’s a word!!) of rural France, and we wanted more. After reading about Poitou Charentes in a French magazine in…

Week 7 — the story continues

Australia has some of the most stringent immigration laws of most countries. And rightly so. You don’t just turn up and live in the “lucky country”. In fact, you don’t just turn up here, period. As we found out when Victoria tried to visit for a holiday. Needing a visa was one…

Week 6 — You Have Done What?

Approaching another birthday, my 39th, I had made one big change to my life in the UK. Rather than being envious of colleagues doing the same job as me, but being paid a whole lot more, I was now one of them. Returning from South America, I made a conscious decision. I was now a…

Moving to France, the early stages

After we got home from our 3-month sabbatical in Quillan, on American Independence Day 2011, I’ll…

Week 5

It was love at first sight, if you believe such a thing exists. I knew from the very first moments that my life would revolve around her in some way shape or form. Australia. She was, and remains, beautiful. She had me hooked from the start. And I have been in love ever since.