The idea for us to move down to Melbourne didn’t come out of nowhere.

However, I can’t quite put my finger on when we started thinking it might be a good idea. What I can recall however, is that we decided to go and visit a few weeks before Christmas.

We went to Melbourne the first time on an inter-state flight. Melbourne is quite different to Sydney. In my opinion it has much more interesting things to do and see than Sydney does, for my taste at least. Vintage shops, charity shops selling good value clothes and antique shops. Lots of art galleries and museums to see. International food markets and artisan markets, for starters.

These are the things that I like spending my time doing if you hadn’t guessed. Sydney had some of these things, but not the abundance that I have seen since we moved down here only a few weeks ago. That being said of course the three months we spent back in lockdown didn’t help with the lack of exploring we did.

We visited Melbourne in December last year, we liked it so much that we decided we wanted to move there. In January our landlord tried to increase our rent so we decided to leave as soon as we could.

We had two months to figure out where we were going to live, whether we should stay in Sydney or not. That is when we decided once and for all Melbourne was where we wanted to be. Not Sydney but, how would we plan with only two months before it happened?

Well with our experience planning to move from England to Australia, this was a piece of cake in comparison. We employed the help of the same moving company that helped us first time around.

After they had picked up our possessions and left we put everything else in the car that we could and then set about moving from Sydney to Melbourne. Now we could have done the trip in one day (8-9 hours on the road). However I didn’t think that was fair on Colin to expect him to drive all that way at once, and also I wanted us to enjoy the process of moving. We weren’t going to be able to enjoy it if we tried this way, or at least Colin wouldn’t have.

The trip took us three days in all. The scenery we passed through was beautiful. We saw vast open countryside, deep green rolling hills. Red Gum trees often lined the motorway on either side. They were strangely uniform and tall. I could imagine that a heavy wind could quite easily make them fall. Sadly, we didn’t see any native wildlife that I had hoped to during this trip down to Melbourne. We did get bitten by mosquitos frequently.

There were roads that Colin loved to drive on and I did not. These were the sorts of roads that were terribly narrow. On one side there would be a drop down into a valley. The other would be the hill that car would be essentially hugging as you drove around. I suppose these roads put me on edge because other cars were going so fast, and both ways they didn’t seem to want to slow down. These roads reminded Colin of New Zealand hill roads, they did to me too. I felt equally the same about those roads. Happy to have survived them.

On the first day we drove to Canberra where we caught up with a friend of mine over drinks and dinner. We also saw the outside of the Australian parliament on the way through. On day two we drove to Albury, and then finally on the Sunday we made it to Melbourne and to our serviced apartment.

Where are we now? Good question! In limbo is the correct answer. Instead of renting we are in the process of buying a house. Or at least trying to, next week we will be taking two houses to auction. In Australia it seems that buying houses are mostly taken to Auction rather than at a set price.

We are also on a time crunch because as it turns out both Colin and I are going on trips to Europe. Or at least Colin is, he is talking at a large tech conference in Spain whilst I go back to the UK to spend some time at home with my parents . It has not been quite a year and a half since I was on British soil, I am looking forward to the small things.

So with a month to find and buy a house will we do it before we go on our trips? That will wait to be seen. It is all very exciting, if we are unsuccessful next week then it is not the end of the world.

I’ll be back in England baking scones and drinking tea in no time at all.

Thank you for reading, until next time.

Thumbnail credit to Kadarius Seegars via Unsplash

Email me if you would like to discuss anything I have written in this blog article.