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.

In Lincolnshire

Just catching you up on what we’ve been up to the past few days.

Wednesday

We got tickets for the open top bus tour around London and it happened to rain fairly heavily all day. Of course. It took us through lots of Monopoly places (Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, Bond Street, Oxford Street, Fleet Street, Strand, Marylebone, Mayfair, Park Lane – I’m sure there were more), past the Houses of Parliament, Hyde Park, St Pauls Cathedral, over London Bridge, the Tower Bridge to the Tower of London. We spent a couple of hours there, saw the Crown Jewels, instruments of torture (that was fun), an exhibition on Henry VIII and his armour/weapons etc. Then we headed up the Thames by ferry to Greenwich, where we met up with Rosanne and Jon Brand - Rosy auditioned me for the radio station back in 1995 and we worked together at the AFP for the past 2 years. They live in a townhouse right owned by one the members of the Hollies right at the Greenwich pier. Rosy took us through the Royal Naval College, the Royal Observatory and the Royal Park Greenwich. It’s a beautiful place and if we were to live in London, Greenwich would probably be the place. Macca’s for dinner – at least the kids liked it.

Rosy took this typical Lovett family portrait at the Royal Naval College – Anna at her best:

This is Anna and Jack straddling the Greenwich Meridian – one foot each in the Western and Eastern Hemispheres:


Thursday

We went for a big walk through Hyde Park, stopping at the Italian Gardens, the Peter Pan statue down the Serpentine via the Diana memorial fountain, watched some soldiers being trained to do show jumping (yes, with horses), through the rose garden (which is absolutely stunning), then through Green Park to Buckingham Palace (just in time to see the changing of the guard), then round to Westminster Abbey. We had planned to go in, but they charge £30 for a family just to go inside, so we ended up giving it a miss and moving on to the Houses of Parliament. Pretty worn out by this stage, so hopped on the Tube back to Paddington and had a nice dinner at an Italian place near the hotel.

Friday

Packed up, then while Carolyn took the kids to a park I headed off to Marble Arch (about 30 minutes walk) to collect the car. After a while I realised that I couldn’t find the place so I called them and discovered that it wasn’t at Marble Arch at all, but actually 2 blocks from our hotel. Happy.

Got the car (VW Passat) back to the hotel and packed it (glad we organised a wagon – oops, must call it an Estate!) then headed off toward Lincolnshire. Carolyn nearly had a fit when we drove past the Abbey Road studios and the crossing from the cover of Abbey Road. The rest of us had a good laugh. Had a lovely drive out of London past Peterborough and through lost of small congested towns (I probably won’t follow directions from Google maps again) to Manby in Lincolnshire, where we had a meeting with the school principal. The school looks ideal for the kids and we think they’ll thrive there. Rushed off from there to look at a house at Saltfleet – a converted granary, it’s fully furnished, so all we’d need to provide is sheets and pillows. There are other people interested in it, so we’re hoping we get it. Back to the school to continue the tour, then back to Saltfleet to settle in to the Crown Inn for the next week. They have karaoke on Friday nights - it’s very loud and the singing just gets worse as the night (and beer) goes on, but thankfully all those years of the kids going to sleep while we have band practice paid off and they went to sleep in a couple of minutes.

Saturday

In to Louth (the nearest town of significant size) to put in our application for the house and to have a look around. It’s quite a nice little town with a typical charming English town centre. We then headed North up the coast to Cleethorpes, just south of Grimsby. It’s a holiday town and was so busy we couldn’t find anywhere to park, so turned around and headed back to Saltfleet. We found a sign “To the Sea” so headed up there. At the end of the road we got out and walked up to the gate to find that the sea is about 2km further out – to get to it you have to walk across a lovely grassed area which was used for bombing training for the RAF in WWII, so is riddled with unexploded bombs, at least that’s what the signs say. There are lots of old RAF bases in the area, which were used as the launching areas for the Battle of Britain squadrons.

We headed south of Saltfleet to try to get to the beach, but ran out of time. More accurately, it got close to kick-off time for the FA Cup final, so we had to go back to the pub. The owner thought he’d do a promotion, so did up a sign saying that beer was £1 per pint off till the first goal. He was relieved when Everton scored the quickest ever cup final goal – after just 25 seconds.

We went in to Louth for dinner at a the Whyte Swanne Inn (established 1612) and I had the biggest roast dinner I’ve ever had.

Sunday

Up a bit later today then in to Louth to check out Hubbard’s Hills, a lovely park on the river which seemed to have attracted all of Louth this morning. 16 degrees and they’re out there in shorts (some of them even had the hankies tied at the corners for hats) thinking it’s hot. Back to the pub for a sleep in the afternoon, then we got ready to go to church. Thought we’d get an early dinner as church starts at 6pm, but do you think anywhere would be open serving food at 5? Of course not, so we ended up having Mars bars. We went to church at King’s Church Saltfleetby, which is pastured by the husband of the school principal. They meet in an old Anglican church building (it took them over a year to get council approval to use the building for a church!) and there were about 30 people there tonight as some are away for the half-term school break. The pastor spoke about how to know when God is leading you and I think he covered everything we’ve learned over the past year with getting here. It was very encouraging and confirmed for us again that we’re doing what God wants us to do. Still keen to find out how that is going to look!

This week, we’ll be organising school uniforms for the kids and hopefully signing a lease for the house in Saltfleet (we’re praying that we’ll get a quick answer from the landlord), possibly going up to York for a day and working out where to stay after this week – the Crown Inn is nice enough, but we’re keen to go somewhere else till we get the house.

Made It!

Hi everyone,

Sitting in McDonalds and about to run out of battery on the laptop, so need to be quick.

We have made it here! Our flight from Sydney was delayed over an hour, so we ended up having to race from it to the next flight at Abu Dhabi. Had fish & chips for dinner (what else) and a very early night to try to overcome jetlag, which largely worked.

We went for a walk down through Hyde Park (saw the most beautiful English Garden on the way) to Buckingham Palace

and happened to get there just as the rehearsal for the Trooping of The Colours for the Queen’s Birthday. Nice surprise.

We had an appointment to organise our bank account and national insurance number (like the tax file number). The kids enjoyed the ride on the double-decker bus to get there and the tube to get back to the hotel. The hotel turns out to be about 100 metres form the one we stayed at back in 1996.

More soon.