In my entire life, I have never seen such a perfect set of examples of manifestation at completely the last minute — but the way things unfolded during our last week at our former home in country Victoria in Australia was fairly magical. There are far too many episodes to cite, but a handful include…

1. Every single item of furniture that we had for sale actually sold. (hooray!)
2. Almost every small item sold at the garage sale and the rest went out the door to the local junk shop fellow.
3. Some dear friends in the village allowed us to store a set of chairs and tables until January at their place when the frazzled buyer of those items had a flakey courier company who wanted to tack on a $900 ‘Christmas surcharge’ to do what they had already been contracted to do.
4. Car #1 and tractor sold easily.
5. Car #2 did not sell, but we learned from people that we trust that a very reputable mechanic in the village could take care of getting the roadworthy certificate for us, would sell it for us, and would just deposit the funds electronically into our account. And apparently he has done this for a number of people who were moving overseas in the last few years. Whew!!!

The ‘odd and awful’ aspects of our TIMING with a capital T were that (1) we completely ran out of time and didn’t get to say a proper goodbye to quite a few people, (2) we just about killed ourselves with the packing, moving, cleaning, and (3) I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia.

I am very blessed right NOW though in spite of the amount of medication I’m taking. We are staying with friends in Sydney, the sun is shining brightly, the sea outside the window is sparkling, and I can just relax and get healthy again before we fly to Amsterdam in 2 weeks.

I’ll discuss a few of our plans and where we will be country-wise in the next post.

Life feels better and better. Big old world — here we come!

Soon, very soon we are being launched (quite voluntarily!) back out into the world. The plans for where to travel, who to work for (Mark), who to write for (me), what to do along the way will be an unfolding adventure. We have been so ‘land-locked’ for several years now here in Australia that we just want to let it f-l-o-w and see where the winds of change take us.

At least we have a starting point and we’ll be headed back to the UK first. But during the Christmas holidays? And with no firm flight reservations yet until we get the proceeds from the sale of our darling house in our hot little hands? We really are trusting the fates!

Mark’s family have a large and very pretty home in Norfolk, so we will go there first once we leave Australia and perhaps have a few weeks of decompression. I have a series of articles that I am pitching to several publications and I’ll keep you posted on those.

These last couple of years have been quite stressful and we’re currently in a state of tightly controlled action, selling a houseful of furniture and 2 cars and 2 trailers and a tractor. Oh yes, and did I mention packing, packing, packing and then putting what we do decide to keep into storage in the nearby town of Ballarat? Whew!

At least there will be no more leaping for the phone every time it rings and then zooming around with the vacuum and sponge because another potential buyer is on the way. Hearing the words “she signed” while we were on a 4 day getaway at the seaside last week gave me an alternating sense of butterflies in the brain from happiness and butterflies in the stomach from nerves knowing that we had to divest ourselves of 85% of our worldly goods in one month!

I’ll be back soon-ish with an update or two. But in the meantime — where is that packing tape???

Enjoy!

Editing Screen

So how in the world did I end up this far behind on photo editing???

True admission here (said sheepishly) — I have been having so much fun just taking the photos over the last couple of years that I have seriously neglected to do the boring ‘paperwork’ in digital form that is essential to keeping track of the hundreds of images I shoot every month. I’ve been more than a bit hit and miss in that regard and now I am really paying for it!

Tell people that you are a photographer or photojournalist along with being a writer and I almost always receive a bit of “Ooo-ahh. How cool!” response from them. They immediately get a glamorous image in their head of what fun that would be to travel for a living, take pictures all day, write a few lines at night, and how fabbo the finished products are. Um — yes and no. (grin!)

There are thousands — no kidding — thousands of images on my hard drive (and yes, safely backed up online as well, in case you were wondering!) to go through, decide what is worth keeping, and then do all of that information tagging onto each one so that I can get my online portfolios at a few agencies humming away smoothly and (hopefully!) profitably.

What is actually giving me a lot of joy is the reliving of some magical moments — the gorgeous scenery that I documented on various trips, the funny moments we stumbled upon, the people we saw. So I am allowing those snippets of joy to seep into my brain and heart even as I shake my hands occasionally to get the blood flowing again after typing for hour after hour after hour.

Ah well — it certainly will prompt me to not relive this digital-paperwork intensive and to keep up to date with it all on a very regular basis.

Cube Serviced Apartments - King Studio

Yellow Yarra Tram on Bourke Street, Melbourne, Australia

All 3 parts of my series — Frugal Travel in Expensive Melbourne — is now online at my travel journalism site, A Wanderful Life