Moving day

The move....

Finally in June 2009 we are getting round to writing our blog of Gill and Chris' move to Melbourne from Hertford. The idea for a move to Oz first started in my head in 1999 when I got back from 8 weeks backpacking round Australia. However, it took 10 years and a trip to New Zealand in 2007-2008 for this idea to come to fruition...

I was offered a job at Monash Uni in September 2008 and we spent 2 weeks in Melbourne in Nov 2008. After our reccie, we decided to go for it and make the move over here. Chris was offered a number of jobs when we were over here for our reccie and that made our decision a whole heap easier...

So after applying for a 457 visa, we finally made the move in March 2009. This first post contains pictures of our moving day... The move was surprisingly hassle free and less stressful than what we had imagined. A process which was also made easier as Chris had been on gardening leave since Jan and so had time to sort out lots of stuff... Time from making the decision to moving day passed very quickly and we were soon leaving our fab house in Hertford that we had only bought 2.5 years before...

Soon we were surrounded by boxes which were all packed for us by Doree Bonner into our container which would take our possessions to Oz. Everywhere we looked was covered in boxes and the enormity of what we were about to do hit home!!!!

Luckily it all fitted in our 20 ft container (just!). The container was loaded up and left our house - no going back now!!!! Plus we had agreed a rental on the house and the new tenants were moving in a couple of days later....

After 2.5 days of packing our possessions left our house and I was left with the 3 bags shown below for the next few months until our container was delivered.... I did wonder how I was going to cope with so little stuff but as we were on a temporary visa we only had 23 kg of luggage allowance!!!!! So with this small amount of luggage I headed off to my parent's house for a week before we flew to Melbourne to start our 2 year adventure....