Settling At last

Well, we finally have our new home. Having been told by the estate agent that it would take 10 days to get into the house, we’re finally in and it only took 21 days!

Our third week in Lincolnshire has been fairly routine with the kids going to school each day. Our pastor told us on Sunday about the supermarket in Louth, so now we can get all the supplies we need – we just couldn’t find it in the main shopping area. Scott had to go to the doctor on Monday and was told he has “conn-joonc-teev-eye-tiss” so has been doing eye drops all week. All better now.

While the kids are at school, we’ve been having a look at some of the towns around here – Mablethorpe and Sutton-On-Sea are tourist seaside towns, very reminiscent of the Gold Coast in the 60s.

We’ve also spent a lot of time organising getting in to the new house. The agent and landlord have been pretty inflexible, demanding 6 months rent in advance, so we had to organise getting the funds transferred quickly. Everything managed to work properly for once and the money got here in time, so in we go.

The house is called The Old Granary – it’s 3 stories, 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 garage (which has been turned into a laundry) and no shower. It should do us till the end of the year and at least we don’t need to worry about finding rent money each month. We expect the kids will be sick of sharing a room by then and we’ll probably be looking for something with a shower and closer to the school and/or work - whatever and wherever that turns out to be). Our things are finally on the ship, which is due to arrive in about 4 weeks. It’ll be nice to have more of our things with us – Carolyn is especially missing her electric piano and the kids are missing their toys.

We’re enjoying living in Saltfleet. It is a lovely little village with about 40 houses, a petrol station with general store, a Methodist chapel, 2 pubs and a caravan park. It’s about 10 minutes from the school at Manby and 20 minutes from Louth. We keep asking each other if we can believe that we’re really living in an English seaside village.

We will miss North Somercotes, though. It’s a lovely, quiet village, bigger than Saltfleet and has its own RAF base – Donna Nook is a great name for a RAF base, don’t you think? We spent a bit of time on the beach after school on Wednesday watching some F16s doing laps and practice bombing runs along the range (which is on the beach). It was fun and very loud.

We’ve discovered Freeview TV – 40+ digital TV channels. We get to see Grand Designs every night, Top Gear is on 4 times per day on “Dave” and if you miss it you can watch it an hour later on “Dave ja vu”. BBC News tells you the same thing every half hour and, like Australian news, has a lot of “we’re just as good as America” attitude.

Some Routine At Last!

After 9 weeks of living out of suitcases, routine is starting to come back to our lives.

Jack and Anna have finished their assessments at school and have started on their normal work. Here they are on their first day, posed with our rental Passat in front of the Granary (where we are staying in North Somercotes).

More routine on the way – we found out today that we have finally got the rental house we applied for in Saltfleet! It’s fully furnished, so all we need to organise is pillows, sheets and phone/internet connection. We hope we’ll be in the house by the end of next week.

Most of this week has been running errands, doing shopping, organising for our stuff to get shipped from Australia, etc. But, we have managed to visit Grimsby – it sits on the south side of the Humber and is best known as a fishing port. Elton John also recorded a song about it once, although I can’t remember how it goes. The trip to Grimsby was mainly to get hold of a mobile broadband thingy. It’s very slow here (no 3G reception) but at least we can send and receive email from this place.

Carolyn and I also went to Lincoln today to return the beloved Passat and exchange it for an Astra for the next 4 weeks. It’s a lot smaller than the VW but big enough to get us around until we can buy our own car. While we were there, we went to Lincoln cathedral, which is quite spectacular. It’s one of the 3 biggest cathedrals in the UK and one of the oldest – the original building was started in 1072.

Lincoln was originally a Roman fortress and was occupied by the Romans until the 4th century AD and there are many Roman, Norman and Tudor structures around the cathedral area, especially in Steep Hill Street.

 

 

 

 

 

We also had a very encouraging meeting this afternoon with the Pastor of the Kings Church Marshes, Stephen Franklin and his wife, Mandy. We spoke a lot about their vision for the church, our reasons for being here and common elements for each of our families on our journey to this area. They told us about how they had been led to pray for people from the North, South, East and West to come to the school and church – they were unsure about praying for people from the East as this area is on the East coast. As it turns out, that prayer was made on the day that we had felt led to change our destination from Yorkshire to Lincolnshire. More confirmation for us that we are in the place God wants us to be.

Finally, a couple of sunset pictures, looking over the fields across the road from our accommodation. Keep in mind that these were taken at 9.30pm. More Lincolnshire pictures soon!

 

Hi everyone. We were going to send pictures from Lincolnshire this time, but we haven’t taken any yet. Sorry.

So this week we have, in no particular order:

• Been to the beach at Mabelthorpe a couple of times. It’s a seaside holiday town with a huge beach (yes, with sand, not rocks) that stretches for miles. It’s kind of like the Gold Coast in the 60s – lots of fun parlours, gaudy shopfronts, etc. Still, there was sand and waves, so the kids have enjoyed it.
  
• Done laundry - fun for the whole family.
• Spent a morning in Lincoln getting a tyre replaced on the rental car. Even less fun than the laundry, although the kids found a pet shop that had unusual pets – things like Chinchillas, snakes, tarantulas. Lovely.
  
• Applied for a rental house and had no response from the landlord yet. Hopefully soon.
  
• Heard the final minute of the State of Origin over the internet. NRL gets absolutely no coverage here at all.
  
• Noticed that the only references to Australia on the news are to do with Kylie Minogue or the cricket team. Who the heck is Kevin Rudd?
  
• Watched the Labour Party, and the Prime Minister in particular, run headlong down the road to oblivion due to the expenses scandal. They had council and European elections yesterday and Labour is being well and truly booted out.
  
• Started the kids at school. They’re real little celebrities there, at least for the moment. Anna’s making friends with everyone, Jack’s taking his time but there is one boy his age with similar interests and sense of humour, so he will settle in over time. They’ve been doing assessments to see what level they are at in each subject and have done well so far. They will finish those tests today, we’ll get the last bits of uniform over the weekend and they’ll be into it properly from Monday.
  
• Got tired of living in a pub. It’s been pretty good, but we’re a bit sick of being limited to 2 rooms. We’re moving to a holiday house for a week in North Somercotes, which will cost about the same as the pub but we can cook for ourselves (instead of spending £30 each night on dinners) and we’ll have a living area. Hopefully by the time the week is up we will have the rental place organised. The pub has karaoke tonight, right below our rooms. If it’s anything like last week it will make us appreciate the holiday house even more.
  
• Started looking for work. It’s going to take some time by the look of things as Lincolnshire is not a centre for anything. Nothing to be anxious about, but I probably will be anyway.
  
• Spent some time looking around Louth, the nearest town. Eventually found a place that makes real cappuccinos and had dinner at a pub that was established in 1612.
  
• Tried some English food – Eccles cake, Cottage Pie (like Shepherds Pie), Flapjacks (more like a muesli slice than a pancake), Lincolnshire sausages
  Introduced the kids to the local wildlife – Jack’s been stung by a bumble bee and Anna by a stinging nettle.
  
• Registered with the National Health Service, so now we can have free health care. See above.
  
• Got our UK bank account organised and registered with a service that does transfers from Australia for a very low fee.
  
• Spent lots of time in our rental VW Passat Estate – like this but black and a diesel, which has done 600 miles (1000km) so far on ¾ of a tank.
  
  
  
  

More later, hopefully with pictures.