The Process of Saying Goodbye

If it wasn't for the fact that I am completely sentimental, perhaps this travelling, making friends and moving around wouldn't seem so hard. A friend said to me not too long ago how lucky we are to be sad - she was right. How lucky we are to have had the opportunity to live in this great city/country, lucky that we have met incredible people and lucky that we get to go home to our family back in Canada...and know that we will always have a few houses to stay at when next we return to Oz!!

And the only way to start the process was to throw a great party....55 of our friends, lots of fantastic Australian wine, good music (accompanied by Countdown and Rage videos from the 80s!) and lots of food and dancing....oh yeah - until 4 a.m. We are still recovering and hoping the neighbours have not blacklisted the property but it was a blast. Can't say its the same body recovering from 20 years ago but lots of fun!! Thanks to all our friends for coming, to Tim for the media centre, for Abby and Karen and their food contribution, to Chantal for the visit from the fire brigade - how lucky we are indeed to have such a supportive community around us.

The countdown to the next adventure continues - just time to finish work, pack the house, drink more wine and off to Northern Australia for the long trek to the Great White North!!

Welcome to the Family of Five

When we moved to Australia 2.5 years ago, a Canadian friend said to me - start a blog about your adventures...alright, it's taken me 2.5 years to get around to it. I thought however that now was the time to do it as we wrap up our Aussie adventure and life down under and make the long trek back to the Great White North via SE Asia and China.

So, welcome to the Family of Five - if you are reading this, you are probably already a member of our extended family. We tend to pick up lots of people no matter where we go - we are a social family and like to hear the stories of others so we thought we would share our story for anyone who wants to follow along.

A good assumption is that this is the clan on the right. This (rare) great photo was taken in Los Angeles at our friend Kathleen & Stu's house after 15 hours of travel on our way to Toronto for Christmas. It still amazes me that we managed to be awake during what was a great stopover visit and Christmas lunch!! It was downhill from there as the jet lag settled in over a period of 7 - 9 days....it was of course worth it.

Stay tuned....more to come as we live the chaos of wrapping up school, work, moving, planning the 9 week odyssey and get prepared to say goodbye to our adopted home.