Eyjafjallajokull

We finally moved, but we'll still be around.

We didn't go far just 2km down!

The boxes are gone, we've cleaned up the mess.

We'd like to give you our new address.

Even with all my googling and reading about moving, we could have never prepared ourselves for this experience. 

It’s been 34 days since i last posted. Me, the supposed multitasking person just had no time to sit down, and update the blog. 

[So!]

We were supposed to move on the 18th of April.

Never in our wildest dreams did we ever think that the words, vulcano, eruption, Island, Eyjafjallajokull, would have an impact on our move down in South Africa. We'll it did. 

The occupants and owners of our new house were heading back to Germany. We’ll need i say more. Flights within, to, and from Europe were cancelled. According to my Google sources, Eyjafjallajokull created the highest level of air travel disruption since the Second World War, and we were slap bang in the middle of this disruption. 

I always believe things happens for a reason, and this time round i know the reason, we were’nt even halfway through the packing, and the 10 day disruption in flights were exactly the time we needed. 

I could'nt understand why everybody who came to visit in the weeks before the move, would turned their eyes upwards when i said, we are almost done packing, only a couple of boxes more to go. 

Now i know. We had more stuff than we thought, the house was bigger than we thought and we have collected more stuff over the past 9 years than we thought. 

You know the saying: “A friend is someone you call to help you move. A best friend is someone you call to help you move... a body.” 

By this time it felt to me as if we were just moving the body around the house, and so my M & M friends to the rescue. The G was on a serious deadline at the office and also had to go out of town the weekend before the move. I was like a loose canon shooting in all directions and not hitting anything. Like true friends they just pitched up and started packing, with Katrien, our housekeeper, keeping us all filled to the brim with coffee and sandwiches.  I will forever be in debt to them. 

We couldn't change the moving date, Eyjafjallajokull wasn't going to turn the tables in our favor any day soon, and with the backlog of flights we weren't sure when we would be able to get the keys to the new house. We had no choice but to camp in the old house until we could take occupation of the new house. [So!] we kept a bed, a fridge, and had take aways everyday.

Luckily everything was going into storage.  Ye right. 

When you plan a move you tend to just see the big stuff, couch, bed, fridge, TV etc etc. Oh no, don’t be fooled. There is much more to the contents of a house than the big stuff. It’s the small stuff, the stuff in the cupboards, under the beds, in the garage, the attic, the storage room. The birthday cards you’ve kept since you were born,  the 500 magazines you’ve collected over the years, bolts and nuts, ropes and swimming pool pipes. Garden utensils and the tyre’s i was going to make a potato garden with, just like they explained in the magazines.

It was easy to move the big stuff, all done in a morning. Then we went back home and realized there was still a whole truck load of small stuff. We could have filled a skip with all the small stuff. That is when sentiment flew out the window and we started giving away, dumping and burning.  What a great sense of freedom we achieved with this. We eventually de cluttered. No need to keep your 10th London underground ticket from 20 years ago. One is enough.

I still have the magazines but reduced it to 150. The G kept some old army paraphernalia.  A couple of old love letters, traveling maps, baby shoes and all our photos. We now each have a memory box which we can unpack in front of the fireplace, laugh at our funny 80’s hairstyle, and go down memory lane. 

Eventually 10 days later all flights were re-instated, we gave away the bed, sold the fridge, packed our clothes, dogs and bird in the car, and hit the road to our new abode.