We are what is often referred to as ping pong Poms! We moved to Australia with our three children in 2004 and returned to England a year later as things didn’t quite work out as expected. We settled back into English life and purchased a lovely new home, but the thought of Australia was never far from our minds, so we decided to return again in 2009. Life was hard for a couple of years; we missed our family terribly and the network of friends who were always on hand to help. It was a difficult transition for our two daughters who were 17 and 13 although our son, 9, loved the change of life and soon loved everything life had to offer here in Australia.
However, life still wasn’t working out as we expected – house prices were rising here, we still had a house in the UK, and the exchange rate never seemed to be in our favour. Along with that was the fact that I was reluctant to move our family away from the Northern Beaches, made it difficult for us to find a suitable place to find a home.
With the ‘children’ now all in their 20s, Andy finally convinced me to start looking at houses slightly further afield. The first time we travelled to Glenorie I thought it was ‘the back of beyond” and so far away from everything familiar and I had made my mind up before we visited that it would not be a place I would end up living.
How wrong was I! From the first open house we went to in Glenorie I was proven wrong – not something I like to admit, and luckily we didn’t have to wait too long until we found our dream home in Fiddletown which we moved into early October. We are all extremely happy living in this beautiful area and have enjoyed exploring what it has to offer – although I have to say I’m not loving the fact that there is a very large python which suns itself on our hedge or that there are plenty of big spiders constantly on our veranda but I love that today we helped a turtle cross the road and there are constantly ducks in our back garden. I wake up to the sound of birds, and I look out the window to see wallabies happily grazing on our grass. And the stars – how lucky are we to be able to see so many at night? I think we have found our little piece of heaven right here.
