The Great Australian Adventure
Well Lets Start At The Beginning(ish)
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OK, so what’s the crack with the infatuation in moving to ‘land down under’, well it all started many (many) moons ago…..well roughly 10 years ago whilst I was a student dietitian. I as part of my dietetic degree was given the opportunity to do some of my placement abroad. Initially the plan was that I partnered another student dietitian to Belize, but for reasons that escape me this never came to fruition, however round about the same time I became friendly with another student who had just returned from a placement working for the Health Department of Western Australia, and all she kept banging on about is what ‘a time’ she had out there, I was intrigued, and before I knew what was what I was booking flights to the most remote capital city in the world, that’s Perth to you and me. Well needless to say I literally had the time of my life, and the overseas placement was over far far to quickly. After the placement I had the opportunity to briefly travel to other ‘bits’ of Oz before clambering back on an aircraft to leave my new spiritual home to eventually arrive back home (!!?!) in the UK. Well it was from that moment on that I knew that one of my main goals was to return to Australia on very much a more permanent basis.
OK, so if you don’t mind I’m going to jump forward a couple of years to 2004 when I met Hazel, who some of you may know a little better as @hazelpa from twitter. From the moment I met her I would not shut up about my dream of leaving the rainy, cold, dark, dirty…….UK. I think initially she was not that fussed about this idea and probably just smiled and nodded at the correct point with the occasional “yes dear” to show she was (sort of) listening. So after a couple of years of nodding and ‘yes dear’ing we some how ended up on the doorstep of our first (of many) migration agents to discuss the possibility of migrating, I’ll come back to this migration agency later on, but in a nutshell it was advised that we migrated to Adelaide. Once advised this Hazel & I thought it would be a good idea to visit Australia, and more importantly Adelaide to see if firstly Australia was what I remember it been and secondly would Hazel love the place as much as I remember doing, within weeks our flights were booked and shortly after that I was winging my way back to my spiritual home………
I remember thinking to myself on the flight to Sydney that I would not badger Hazel with constant questions as to whether she was enjoying herself or not, after all she had to make her own mind up. So our time consisted of 1 week in Sydney and 1 week in Adelaide, we had intended to spend some time in Melbourne but due to time constraints we had to side step this city. In all honesty I’m not too sure Hazel was taken by Sydney but I think she started to warm to it, in regard to Adelaide it was Glenelg that appeared to be our suburb of choice, in addition Hazel seemed to have a bit of a soft spot for Adelaide’s autobarne. So after a fortnight our time was up and for the 2nd time in my life I was seriously contemplating becoming an illegal immigrant, after all Australia is a very big place and before they (the authorities) could of deported me they would have to find me….but as good law abiding citizens we (reluctantly) made our way back to the UK. Having promised not to badger Hazel in regard to her thoughts whilst we were in Australia, we had barely settled ourselves in our plane seats when the inevitable question came blurting out of my mouth “So what did you think?…”, thankfully it was all good news and Hazel announced that she could see herself settling down ‘down under’, I don’t think we talked about much else as we made our way back to the UK. I think that this life changing decision was certainly supported by being disbelieved by British Airways staff at Heathrow that our flight from Hong Kong to the UK had been delayed and that’s why we were on the verge of missing our connecting flight to Manchester, I distinctly remember them telling us to run for our connection, when asked about our luggage their response was something along the lines of ‘never mind that just get on the plane’ !!?!……….welcome back to the UK
