Flashback to some transition craziness in Australia

Looking back at my blog post at the end of June and I’m amazed—there was so much going on. It's probably no wonder we've hit a bit of a wall today with energy, after two very busy months with so many decisions and transition.

One thing I mentioned in the above linked blog post was uncertainty about cars. Here’s how it turned out:

Our car, that we bought second-hand in August last year, cost us quite a bit in repairs over the year. It really didn't turn out to be a great purchase. As we looked towards transferring ownership to our eldest son, we decided to fix a ding that was caused during a hit-and-run incident while David was supervising a learner driver. This took several weeks at the end of June and early July to fix at the insurance company's preferred provider.

Thankfully we'd purchased a second car a few weeks previously, with the intention of our middle son taking ownership of it after he got his licence. We were able to use that car while our main car was getting fixed.

The day we moved all our stuff out of the house (which was a huge day without complications) was the same day our first car was available for collection and it turned into logistics challenge and a race against time as we tried to organise two drivers to be at the panelbeater shop before they shut. That also turned out to be the day we handed our second car over to our middle son.

Our eldest son was moving to Townsville (17 hrs drive north) only a few days after we left Australia and needed our larger car to carry all his stuff, so we planned to transfer ownership of our first car to him. So, a few days after we got it back from the panel beaters—and only four days before we were due to fly out of the country—we borrowed a car from the people we were staying with and put our first car into a different "shop" to get a road worthy certificate (an essential step in such a transfer). We already knew that there was an oil leak, due nearly wrecking the engine during our journey north a few weeks earlier, when our oil completely ran out one morning. We just weren't completely sure where or how expensive it would be to fix. Turned out that it would be an expensive fix and one that we (and our son) didn't have time for, so we retrieved our car.

On our last night in Australia we handed the keys to the car that was still in our name over to our eldest son and left him to deal with the mess, while advising him to sell it on our behalf as soon as he could once he got to Townsville.

His car was an older Corolla sedan that was in pretty good shape and actually passed its roadworthy pretty easily. He transferred ownership to his youngest brother who is due to do his licence test later this year.

Are you confused yet? This was just one of the things going on in the midst of us changing countries, for example, at the time I was still recovering from dental surgery. It's probably no surprise that we're weary today.

David started work a week ago and I've been gradually getting back into things. The heat and humidity is quite draining, even though we have good air conditioning. Our apartment is close to being completely set up and we're so thankful for that (and that we could move in so quickly after arriving). But we've made so many decisions and dealt with so much change these last couple of months. Transition is tiring. I'm glad we're on the other side. It's easy—because we've done this so many times and we've moved back to the same neighbourhood in a country we're familiar with—to race onwards and forget to take rest and be kind to ourselves. So it's good to take a moment to remember the craziness that was happening in those last few weeks in Australia!