April 2014 - The adventures continue
In April 2014 we decided to leave Sydney and head back to the UK. Various reasons, the main one being family. There are lots of things in Sydney we will miss - all the friends we have both made, the sun the beaches but nothing really replaced family. So for the last few months we have been preparing for the move - filling 56 packing boxes with all our belongings.. repacking them multiple times to get them to 30kg... selling all our large belongings on ebay and gumtree.. finally we made it and on April 19th 2014 we were off!

11/04/14 Goodbye Waters Road
Everything out, house cleaned. Today is Hannah, Eva and Kerry’s last day at their respective schools/workplaces. After school we wisked them round to the doctors for their vaccinations. Eva actually laughed as the needle was going in. Much braver than Hannah was! The kids had HepA and Typhoid vaccinations. We just had the typhoid (our blood was tested and we already had the HepA antibodies) It wasn’t fun paying for said drugs yesterday – 700 bucks!

Tonight we stay with Carol and Elena (One of Hannah’s best buddies) – I don’t think we will get much sleep. Up early to sell the car and fridge to an odd Arab called Omar.

Yesterday we said goodbye to all our belongings – 56 boxes left on a van with the seven seas man. I really hope they make it back to the motherland land and our new house.

In a week we will be flying Malaysian Airlines to Bangkok. They still haven’t found MH370. Hoping they don’t lose another one! Before that however, we have a week in a the Grand Plaza at Coogee bay. We are going to be tourists again for a week.

19/04/14 Nice time in Coogee
We had a lovely week chilling in the Crown Plaza at Coogee. Kerry has won an award from her work and they generously gave her a travel voucher. What better way to use it! We took the time to say goodbye to a few of Hannah's close friends that came to visit which was nice.

We walked the Coogee to Bondi (well, most of it) and started getting used to not being able to cook our own food. We shared the hotel with the South African bulls - massive rugby players with outrageous accents everywhere. We loved the buffet breakfasts that were included with our room. Thanks Actelion!

After a 4am start and a bit of kid herding we were trying to relax in the plane on our 7 hour flight to KL. We ticked the ‘resident leaving permanently’ box, which was a bit sad. Relaxing isn’t really the right word, but close. More relaxing was when we went to Darling Harbor a few days ago for a meal – the place was right by where they were demolishing the Sydney exhibit centre – it was so mind numbingly loud we couldn’t hear the kids whinging at all! Byebye Australia! I was just starting to get used to not being surrounded by Australians when who should I find sitting in the seat in front of me? Tim Chick from Optus! What a small world! He was off to Vietnam for a quick escape from the campus as we call it. We had another sad moment we flew over the top of Australia leaving our home for the last 9 years behind.. Quick change and we are on the last leg to Thailand – another 2 hour flight. We jump in the nearest cab and head into the city. Soon we pass our first golden temple and the kids are excited. 'We are in America!' shouts Eva at the top of her voice. Still unsure why...

After waiting until the last bag was collected from the baggage claim we were happily told that our bags hadn't made it onto our flight and would be arriving on the next one in 6 hours. We didn't mind too such as this meant that we wouldn't have to carry them across the city. We arrange for them to be brought to our hotel tonight. Bangkok is crazy hot. We checked into our hotel – the Silom City (pre-booked on Expedia). Our room is on the 13th floor – you take a lift to the 12th and then have to slum it by taking a short staircase to the annex. The stairs are at about 45 degrees. Luckily we have aircon, which is on 24/7 at full blast (we employed the old 'wedge a teaspoon into the key turn the aircon on' slot. heh heh). When I leave our room my glasses steam up! We have a massive king sized bed in our room. It is awesome!