A life on the ocean waves

The full team, with our three very full trolleys!  I am writing this on a very comfortable Virgin flight from Heathrow to San Francisco; the first leg of our adventure has arrived!  Eloise, George and Jack all have their headphones on, and cannot believe they are allowed unlimited screen time for the ten-hour flight.  We are so excited to have five nights in San Francisco, before we fly to Auckland.  San Francisco is currently home to Angus’ sons, Tim and Marcus, and Tim’s wife Robyn.  Although Angus has visited fairly recently, the children and I haven’t seen them since Christmas 2017, so we’re really looking forward to some good family time together. Angus and I are absolutely exhausted, and at least half a stone lighter, having spent endless days and nights emptying our house of every last item, distilling our lives down to just the bags we could check in on our flight.  It seems like we have been “leaving soon” forever, with multiple leaving parties and farew

Happy Valentine’s Day!  Angus and I have spent most of the last two days moving our large items of furniture into our storage unit.  It hasn’t exactly been filled with romance, but it has certainly been an excellent bonding experience, and not without hilarity.  Our storage is a large shipping container, in a secure complex just ten minutes from home, so very convenient.  We thought it would be best if we moved our sofas, armchairs, bed bases, large mattresses, desks, book cases and chests of drawers there this week, while the children are still at school before half term.  Our lovely friends, Jack and Laura, have lent us their enormous Chrysler, which is so vast that it fits a three-seater sofa down one side, a chest of drawers the other, and then a load more boxes in the gaps.  Consequently, I have had the lyrics of “Love Shack” going around my head on repeat all day.                  “Hop in my Chrysler, it’s as big as a whale, and it’s about to set sail.                 I

It’s exactly three weeks until we turn the key on our house and take off to the Southern Hemisphere.   With any luck, by then, we will have some tenants lined up to open the door once again, move their belongings into the empty rooms, fill the air with chatter and laughter, and even more importantly, pay the bills for us while we are away.    Hopefully we won't need this many clothes in the southern hemisphere! It turns out - like many things in life - that renting out a house is not quite as straightforward as we had been led to believe.   We were floating along on a cloud of heady optimism, egged on by the estate agents, thinking that we would have the rental tied up after a single January Saturday of back-to-back “Open House” style viewings.   The “families moving from London”, we were told, would be fighting one another to secure this prime location near to the station.   The terraced-house middle-class clichés – a   side-return and a loft-conversion - would be impos