Southern Summer Days

Our original plan was to move to Australia last August, right in the middle of Winter. That would have given us time to gradually acclimatise throughout Spring and maybe Summer wouldn't have been such a shock?! 

As it happened we arrived right at the beginning of Summer and we have been subjected to two months of scorching heat and sun. While we were fully expecting this (being Australia and all) it has meant that getting out and exploring our new surroundings is proving difficult.

We attempted one weekend to go out geocaching along a heritage trail near where we live. Within five minutes of looking we had to give up and retreat back to the aircon!

And the garden has been coming along slowly, trying to do as much as we can in the mornings and once the sun has set to avoid the heat of the day.

Seeds have been planted and are starting to sprout, so with all this sun things shouldn't take to long to start blossoming. We have got two massive rainwater tanks to water the garden with, so we can be liberal with the water without worrying about the environmental impact.

And we are now the proud owners of 500 worms, who will be shortly munching and converting our kitchen scraps into fertiliser and compost.

We did manage a short trip to Fremantle the other week. Fremantle is Perth's port, and being right on the coast there is always a refreshing sea breeze (the 'Fremantle Doctor'). 

This weekend is forecast to be in the late 20's which will seem positively cold, so we are hoping to do some more exploring of this beautiful coastline.

We splashed out and bought a new car. We were totally intending to just buy a $500 run-around car to get about in, but it turns out you simply can't buy cheap cars that actually run here.

Cars actually seem to keep their value really well, so new cars aren't that more expensive than second hand cars. So we bought a conservative little Hyundai i20 (with a Ghostbusters-themed number plate - unintentional) and are considering it more as an asset than an expense.

Nick's job is still going really well. I am having more trouble. It's strange that although it was my skills as an accountant that got us the visa here, Nick managed to get a job straight away and I am still looking after 2 months.

I've spoken to several agencies, and apparently it's a quiet time of year, and apparently there are a lot of potential applicants out there (boosted by migrants from the East coast and overseas enticed by the mining boom - doh!) making it more difficult.

So at the moment I am officially a starving artist as my tiny art shop trickles in a bit of pocket money for me! I can't say I really mind getting to paint and play with the cats all day. But it would be nice to be able to start saving some serious money up for the next adventure.

Luckily I have a generous partner and parents who make sure I don't go hungry!

January update

Hello everyone, just a quick update to let you know what we have been up do.

We have both been slightly envious of all the UK snow pictures we have been seeing on Facebook! It doesn't help that it has been really hot here in Australia these past few weeks.

So I've been walking around the garden, planning and thinking but not actually doing anything yet.

We are right next to a national park, so we get a lot of wildlife here. We regularly see parrots flying past our windows and there is a flock of kookaburras living in the trees nearby which all cry out in unison at random times.

We've found what was possibly kangaroo poo on the patio, and we came home one day to this little fellow on the door:

There have been NO spiders in the house (although plenty of redbacks in the garage!)

We've got two rooms inside decorated already, our bedroom and the front room so it's starting to feel like home.

I also got to see my youngest brother Brad on his 18th birthday.

I've also reopened by Etsy shop that I put on vacation mode when we took off in the campervan. I'm selling lots of creative bits and bobs, bunting, bags and lots of prints of my watercolour paintings.

Please check it out if you are interested: www.etsy.com/shop/emmaallard

Much love

Emma and Nick x

New Year

It's the start of a new year. Usually we moan at how quickly the last year has gone, but not this time! 2012 was jam-packed with stuff for us. We went on a skiing holiday this time last year and that feels like a long long time ago. Since then, between us we have quit two jobs, sold a house, renovated a campervan, visited over 30 campsites, travelled all around England, Scotland and Wales, judged a sandcastle competition,    had an operation, attended three weddings, sold a campervan, moved to Australia, spent Christmas on a beach and New Years Eve in a hot tub. And we have come to the conclusion - don't let yourself get into routines! Constantly make changes in your life and it doesn't feel like time is disappearing before your eyes. Well it works for us anyway.

Nick got the job he wanted at KTM motorcycles and started last week. So far, so good, considering it's his first job in 10 months! Not much news on the job front for me, but it is still school holidays here and businesses haven't got back into the full swing of things yet.

There's tonnes of stuff to do in our new home... we have started decorating inside and last weekend we checked out all the nearby secondhand and charity shops (or op shops as I have to get used to calling them). We are trying to furnish inside with only second hand stuff - cheaper, more eco-friendly than buying new, and minimal depreciation if and when we need to shift it in the future. 

One thing I am uber-excited about is growing lots of veg. You can practically grow all year round - things like tomatoes, capsicum (peppers) and chillies in the summer and lettuce, broccoli and the like in the winter.

This patch of land is going to be our veggie garden. It needs a bit of work, as you can see. 

I would like nothing more to get out there and start digging but we are having a bit of a heat wave here in Perth, and it's 40 degrees most days, and reasonably muggy too. So physical exercise outside is not happening.

Instead I've been planting some seeds in pots to get things going, these little shoots are my first Australian tomato plants.

The Festive Season Down Under

We hope you are all having a happy, peaceful and relaxing time over the holidays, whatever it is you celebrate.

For us (now down in the southern hemisphere) this time of year now coincides with our summer solstice so I find it a bit weird that people in Australia still put up symbols of winter like snowmen and snowflakes... but of course there are no rules so everyone is entitled to celebrate however they like.

We have been celebrating in true Australian style. We are staying on a campsite in Esperance (down on the south coast of Western Australia) right next to the beach with of course plenty of bunting and paperchains.

Esperance has some absolutely gorgeous beaches, the sea is turquoise and the sand is white fine powder. Apparently George Harrison used to have a holiday house around here somewhere.

We spent Christmas day on the beach, swimming, followed by surf and turf on the barbie and board games in the evening.

A very different Christmas to one usually spent in the UK but just as special!

Sending you all lots of love and peace and best wishes for 2013.

This Past Week...

It's been pretty busy here down under.

At the start of last week Nick had three job interviews, all of which went really well. One in particular, working for a motorcycle company, looks really promising. So we hope to hear some good news soon.

My parents got the keys to their new house in the country where we are all going to be living so we have all spent the past few days making the 45min journey back and forth with boxes. The removal men are coming on Thursday morning for the big bits of furniture and we have to be out of the old house by Saturday so it's all a bit manic!

Saturday night we were treated to a pizza night by some friend's of my parents and we decided we definitely need to build a pizza oven in the new place!

On Sunday we went to a seven year old's birthday party (the beautiful Phemie!) at a water slide park at Hillary's Boat Harbour followed by yummy fish and chips.

And of course there has been more supervision of the kitten as he becomes more and more of handful!

Why Germknödel?

So, we had to change the name of our blog because 'Home is where you park it' was no longer appropriate. We wanted to change it to something that was not just descriptive of our current situation (e.g. 'Down Under', or something like that) because if our situation changes in the future, we'd have to change the blog name again. We therefore chose something that was not specific to anything, so that whatever we blog about, it won't conflict with the blog title.

So, following Emma's mum's suggestion of picking a random word that we like, we have chosen Germknödel. A Germknödel is an Austrian dish which translates as 'yeast dumpling'. We discovered Germknödels when on a skiing holiday and we saw people having a huge delicious looking pudding covered in custard. We had to ask someone what it was and we ordered one. Wikipedia describe it as "a fluffy yeast dough dumpling with a mix of poppy seeds and sugar, filled with spicy plum jam and melted butter on top, often eaten with vanilla cream sauce. It is a culinary speciality of Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia. The dish is served both as a dessert and as a main course"

So that's it. Strange at first but we think something that people will get used to. Like FaceBook, that sounded weird at first, now it's part of our everyday vocabulary (not that I'm suggesting our blog will become as renowned as FaceBook, but you get the idea).

New Blog Name Coming Soon!

We have been thinking for a while about changing the name of this blog.

Originally we started this blog to document all that we have done to our VW campervan, in case what we learnt along the way might be useful to others.

It then turned into a bit of a travel blog as we documented our adventures around the UK in the campervan (and then the bell tent!).

'Home is where you park it' summarises everything we were doing, selling up, moving into a campervan, and becoming temporarily nomadic!

Now the blog has turned into a record of our lives as we document our move to Australia and try to live simply, making more out of less and having as much fun as we can in the process.

But the name now doesn't quite fit and we wanted a name that meant we could blog about all aspects of our lives, now and into the future.

We have been thinking for ages about it and everything we came up with was too corny, or too long. Nick came up with an (apparently) amazing name in his sleep but couldn't remember it when he woke.

So my Mum said, just pick a random word you like. So that's what we have done, and all will be revealed soon!

Job Hunting

We went into Perth city centre last week to chat to some recruitment agents. Having not worked for the past nine months we have pretty much spent ALL our savings and need to start accumulating funds again.

We have been pleasantly surprised by how much we can earn over here... the Perth economy is doing well (due to the mining boom) and there are plenty of jobs around for both of us, paying at least double what we could earn in the UK. The cost of living is definitely higher here, but certainty not double.

A nice surprise has been that Nick's skills appear to be very much in demand! While I have been told that most of Perth shuts down over Christmas and not to expect much until the new year, Nick already has two job interviews lined up for next week. One is for a motorcycle company and they sound really keen!

In other news we have been packing up my parent's house as we are due to move in two weeks. This involves one person packing while the other keeps the extremely mischievous kitten occupied that my parents have recently adopted!