Here we are, our last day in Australia before our big trip to Europe!
It’s been a busy few weeks getting the house packed up and cleaned while at the same time trying to keep it nice and pretty for property inspections several times each week. We (or more accurately, me) made the mistake in one inspection of trying to do some home repairs a few minutes before the tenants arrived. Of course I stuffed it up and couldn’t get it to go back together, so Pedr was up on a chair cursing at me under his breath while he was frantically jimmying a screwdriver into a light socket to try and fix it in time. He managed to get the lights back in place just before people arrived, even though they didn’t work anymore. But we got lucky that no one tried to turn on the lights and no one was the wiser. Appearance is everything.
We eventually got all our junk packed and put a huge amount of stuff in the bin. We’re not very materialistic people and I’m still shocked at how much crap we had. There was one bin night where we must’ve filled up an extra 10 bins belonging to our neighbours. This was a critical mission that had to be done under the cover of darkness so that no one would know about the 5ive CD that was still lurking in the back of my cupboard or Pedr’s old schoolbooks. God knows why we still had any of that stuff in the house.
Yesterday we did lots of important last-minute finalising of stuff like eating a meat pie & crepes at the beach, desperately calling all our bill providers to cancel everything, going shopping, spending hours on hold or waiting for callbacks, enjoying a giant coffee, trying to set up new phones and computers, Pedr finally getting a haircut and then enjoying a dinner of chips and wine (thanks for the wine mum it was really nice!).

Just to prove that Pedr actually went shopping I have a picture!

So today we’re hopefully going to finish all our final prep work; we’ve managed to transplant our explosion of boxes from our house to Pedr’s parents’ house. We still have random odds and ends all over the place, I hope we don’t leave anything important behind. Otherwise there’s not much else we can do so we’re going to just have to suck it up.
We’ve got 3 flights and 31 hours of travel time to get from Sydney to Madrid, with 3 hours in Perth airport. It better have improved since I was last there, we don’t even have lounge access to make it less painful.
It’s only been the last few days/week that this has all started to sink in and feel real, and now it’s all coming together. It’s been great catching up with everyone in the last few weeks, thanks for coming down everyone! We’ll try to stay safe and look after ourselves (but not so much that we don’t have any fun!) and hopefully have lots of stories of craziness and our own stupidity to share with you so we can all have a laugh.

Not long enough in Perth… hopefully can run into you guys on the other side.
3 hours is more than enough for Perth airport, but not long enough for a trip out to the Crown or somewhere else where we can get into trouble. Guess you’ve got no choice now but to go to Europe.
See you soon in Holland!
Have a good trip
Beeko and Alie
The door is always open for you guys in Groningen! :)) Enjoy your Eur trip!!!
Greetz Marjon Sijtsema
We hope you have a safe trip. Enjoy!
Tonny and Bernadine