Hooray! We've finally made it to the U.K.
The movers did a great job of packing up our U.S. flat and we waved goodbye to our stuff on Tuesday. In the end, I only found one thing the movers had missed - a pewter tankard that was a present from my college room mates when I turned 21! Fortunately, there was plenty of room for it in my suitcase, and it is now with my Dad's old tankards waiting for the next set of movers.
Spent Tuesday and Wednesday nights in a hotel at Columbus airport. Wednesday we tied up the last of our loose ends, sold the car, finished cleaning the flat and generally raced around like mad things! In the evening we drank champagne and dined on Big Macs!!!!! Thursday we flew out at 6:55 am!
Our trip over was uneventfull. Everything went very smoothly and we arrived here, in Stanmore, soon after midnight on Thursday. We had to get up early yesterday (Friday) to get to the bank and take care of the final transfer of money for the house. That is now all done and, hopefully, the movers will show up on Tuesday to pack us up.
Wednesday is the actual moving day. Jill will move out of Peel Wyke in the morning as we are moving out of Ladycroft Walk. In the afternoon she will take up residence in Devon and we will move into Peel Wyke. It's a stupid system. Too easy to hit a snag and foul the whole thing up. I wonder if there's a movement to change the house buying and selling process over here. If there is, I want to support it. In some ways this move has been more stressful than the breast cancer was.
Still, never mind. It's almost over. Let's talk about nicer things. The weather here is glorious. Temps in the high 60s and crystal clear blue skies. Very unusual, but extremely pleasant. This weekend is a long bank-holiday weekend, so we are going to do a few things and take it easy the rest of the time. A little break will be welcome before we tackle the next move. After that, there's only one more upheaval when the american stuff arrives in 6 to 8 weeks. Then we can really start to settle in.
For the moment we will be living in a gorgeous house with some very grotty old furniture. We reckon it will take at least a year to get organized and probably longer to really get all the furniture and decoration done the way we want it.
Well, stay in touch - we now have our laptop set up and are ready to continue with e-mails, and ..... stay tuned for the next installment of the Arnfield Moving Adventures ...
