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.