Monday 21 March 2016

It's all coming together.....

Before we head off on our final big adventure, I thought I would share our plans so far about our return to England.

Everything has been very up in the air and speculative.  Until last week.  We now know exactly (90%) how our return will work.

We had the delightful lady, Bonnie, round from the packing company last week.  Consequently we now know most of our return details.

So here goes.....

June 22-24 - the packers come to pack our house!  They do everything.  The air freight will be getting packed on the same day.  This is also the day we will effectively move out and go into a hotel.

This gives us a good 6 days to get the house sorted ready to be handed back to the land lord.  I believe he is putting it on the market.

July 1st - fly to Chicago, with a 3 hour lay over.  Then fly on to England. These flights have been chosen to enable the cat to fly with us.  The company have arranged for her to be transported with a pet moving company.  This will cost us, but will also be very convenient.  I have already begun getting her pet passport up to date.

July 2nd - arrive at London Heathrow.  Our plane gets in at 5.55am.  Our body clocks will be telling us it is just after midnight!  We will collect the cat and get our hire car.  We will then drive on to Chichester, where the company has arranged for us to have a 2 bedroom apartment for 6 weeks.  This gives us time to wait for our container to arrive, and time to find somewhere to live.  We will probably rent to begin with, until we get our finances sorted out.

So there you have it.  The only thing we don't know is what hotel we will be in at Greenville, and what kind of hire car we have.  I'm can't believe we are going back.  I knew it would happen eventually, I just am amazed it has come round so quickly......

Best go on holiday then.........

Wednesday 16 March 2016

All in a months work

Turns out it has been a moth since I last posted.  This keeps happening.  Life is so busy!!!

As usual, this is a photo drop with comments.......  Keep going

I got my Zumba Toning license with the delightful ZES, Renee Picket.  It was a great day, I got to car pool with one of my favorite Zumba instructors on the way too. So now I have my Zumba, Zumba Gold, Zumba Kids and Zumba Toning licenses.  I can't wait to get  to get back to the UK and put all of this awesome training and experience into practice.  And look at her hair..... Love it! (and the abs too......)



 We have had some wonderful wacky weather.  No more snow, thank goodness!  But a lot of wind.  The wind managed to fell one of the trees in the area behind out fence.  Luckily only one little bit of fence broke.  The HOA cam and cleared it pretty quickly too.


Another Zumba event! A master class with the wonderful Loretta Bates.  She is the first person who ever trained me to become a licensed Zumba instructor.  One of my friend running the Master class contacted me and asked if I would like a table at the event.  After umming- and ahhhing (Why?) I decided to go for it.  I practiced the lay out of my stall and everything before hand.  In the end I was able to set up on the day on under 30 minutes.  For a table at a Zumba event, I did quite well.  I covered my costs, and that was the main thing for this event.  There was even some spare profit for Mexican afterwards! 


It was so awesome to dance with the incomparable Loretta Bates.  This girl so rocks!  We were able to talk briefly about my plans for moving back to the UK.  She was able to tell me that she has trained some Zumba instructors in Brighton and around the South Coast.  She will also be there the weekend we (hopefully) fly back, at the ZIN Academy in London.  Gutted we are flying then as i shall have to miss it.  Oh well, there is always next year! 


The same weekend as my Zumba fun, there was a NASCAR race on at Atlanta Motor Speedway. We decided, very last minute (Thursday night) to get some tickets.  We checked out the weather, and purchased those bad boys


So Atlanta Motor Speedway is awesome! it is a mile and a half track.  We had fairly good seats, on the front straight near the pit entrance. It was a good view.  The race was awesome, the kids were great, the weather stunning and all in an excellent time. 

Except the journey home.  Took over an hour to get out of the car park, then traffic was so bad around Atlanta, we decided to go cross country.  What should have been a three hour journey took almost 5.  Put a bit of a dampener on the day.  But then we snuck up on some NASCAR haulers on the interstate.  We saw the 3 (Austin Dillon), the 5 (Kasey Kahne), the 27 (Paul Menard) the 10 (Danica Patrick) and the 31 of Ryan Newman.  


And only Isaac was awake in the back to see them.....

Paul was away the following week, cold weather testing in Colorado.  Jealous doesn't even begin to explain how I felt.  But the boys and I got on with it.  Below you have a rare sight of Oliver being kind to Isaac and tying his shoe (that is an exaggeration, he is kind, most of the time!)


The pair of them took it upon themselves to play school during that week.  Below they are doing P.E, and doing crunches.  Love them.....


Paul had a great time in the snow in Colorado.  He was staying at a place called Keystone.  This happened to be one of the places I had investigated for us to possibly go skiing.  As I say, I was jealous.  But its ok.....


Isaac had a trip to the dentist on Monday.  His top front adult tooth has been coming in in front of the wobbly baby tooth.  The dentist took some X-rays, and decided to pull both teeth.  Getting him to be still to have the injections put in his gum took some effort, but we got there.  He needed both pulled, as the one that is not through yet is VERY far over to the other side, and he may end up with a nice big gap between his teeth, and possibly braces..... We will see! 


Thats it for now.  We have a lady from the relocation company coming on thursday, so expect an update of sorts as to our returning to England plans in the next few days.....