Tag Archives: a date set

Cheshire

Setting a date for flying out of the country

So we set a date for leaving the country for the beginning of May.  The first Tuesday or Wednesday in May.  The 3rd or 4th of May.  We could get everything organised for then couldn’t we.  The visas would have been valid for a month by then.  How much work was there to get done in that time frame?  Oh and it’s a bank holiday week as well.  What could possibly go wrong with that?

  • Arranging time to see both sets of families?
  • Arranging time for family living further afield to come and see us?
  • Arranging the international removal company?
  • Arranging time to clean everything in time for the removers’ arrival?
  • Arranging the flights and ticket upgrades?
  • Sorting through all of your belongings?
  • Getting rid of what wasn’t being taken/stored/sold?
  • Getting rid of the white goods?
  • Selling the car?

You get the idea…

As it turned out, the date of us flying out wasn’t really a factor.  It was how quickly I could get everything ready for the international removal company to come in and take away what was going.  Which meant I needed to sort out what was going from what was not going…

Discussions with a couple of international removal companies and investigations into the wonderfully strict Australian biosecurity controls soon put pay to the idea of the first week of May. Too much cleaning to get done.  Not only did a whole load of stuff need to washed, dried and thoroughly checked over for any trace of anything and everything but then there was the dirt and oil on 7 bikes to deal with but to top it off Stuart was to spend most of his time away from home for the next 5 weeks or so with work tying up or handing over various contracts he was working on.  Not his fault, but it meant he was only really home at the weekends and Saturday’s were usually rather busy and he was rather tired from all the driving he was doing.

The date had to slip.  We needed to set something more sensible.

Let’s start with the day of the week shall we?

What about a Thursday?  That would have us arriving in Australia on a Saturday Australian time… starting work on the next Monday morning…. Err no.

A Wednesday would see a Friday arrival, so let’s pick a Monday or Tuesday instead.  That has us with 4 more dates available in May, 9th/10th, 16th/17th, 23rd/24th and 30th/ 31st.

Well the last option 30th/31st was out.  Not only was that another bank holiday weekend, but also half term and ticket prices would be higher, so would the upgrade charges and the flights and airports very busy… not a great idea.  The 9th/10th was ruled out because there was simply too much for me to get done and my back was hurting too much and suddenly we had a choice of 2…

So what about time frame for the international removers.  How quickly can they come?  Well faster than we could actually be ready as it was to transpire.  They could do the end of the next week… let’s leave it a week or so, shall we.  I have too much cleaning and sorting to get through.  What would go with us, what would get recycled and then there was the kitchen to eat our way through!

We set a date of Wednesday 27th April for the removal company.  That was to slide as well.  It soon became Wednesday 4th May.  I simply could not get everything clean and sorted through in time and even meeting the 4th May deadline was to prove hard.

Cheshire

The Visas were through

Finally, we had the visas and confirmation we were going to go and live in Australia for 3-4 years.  We were going out there blind, having never seen either Canberra or been to Australia before.  We knew a little about Canberra from what we had read online, looked at satellite images, done the random pick a road and see what the Google drive by showed us. We had looked at areas of the city and realised that some were more suitable to us than others.  We needed space, we needed a garden, we needed peace and quiet.  Well I did anyway.

So the 4th April became the day we could go to Australia. Hummm….

There was still a lot of planning to get done.  A lot of arranging of things like some possessions going out in a shipping container.  The 6 bikes and the trike for starters.  But Australian Borders and Security (Customs) have a reputation of being very, very strict.  The bikes and trike would all need stripping down and cleaning to within an inch of their lives.  So would the towbar mounted bike rack.  So would all the camping equipment, the additional bike tools, the…. and the list went on.

More to the point, there was going to be very little time to get it all clean and arranged.

We had agreed with Stuart’s work that we wouldn’t take out things like furniture and white goods.  They would replace it with IKEA equivalent standard in Australia.  That was fine by us.  Other than one bookcase with Patrick had given to us and a few small stools, a couple of small coffee tables which would fit in a box, there was nothing really that we wanted to hold on to.  All of it had been replaced last time around.  We weren’t attached to any of it.

But there were questions to be answered and loads of research to be done.  Could I take my seagrass stools with me?  The ones that I had been weaving over Christmas and the New Year?  They were useful and would easily fit inside a box with additional stuff packed around them.  Investigations answered that question – seagrass rope was considered to be highly processed so not a biosecurity hazard.  It just had to be declared, as did anything wooden, anything with bamboo, anything with…. the list went on.

We set a date, well we set a week when we wanted to have moved to Australia by.  It seemed sensible.  A month’s time.  The beginning of May. Yeh, we could do that couldn’t we?