With the decision made to leave, I switched into planning mode. There was a lot of little details which had to be attended to, not least of all getting the garden back into shape after half a year of absence, and getting the house ready for sale. I won’t bore you with the details, but most of October was actually spent renovating and fixing things up, while handing over my work to my team.
At the same time I got to make plans for a visit by my girlfriend, who was flying in to meet the family and attend my brothers wedding with me. In our conversations we also decided to spend some time seeing the great barrier reef – in nearly 25 years in Australia I had never been to see it!
But before all that, I had to make sure that someone would continue the Halloween traditions: Luckily Stef and Johan were up to the challenge and hosted one hell of a themed party!
As you can see, it was a fantastic night and a great effort theming their whole house!
Meanwhile, Manja was nice enough to fly to Oz with Doris, who in turn upgraded them both to business class. I’ve got to say, I was a liiiitle bit jealous, though I was really just happy to see her. Flowers in hand I waited at the airport with the whole family. Talk about jumping into the deep end – Manja was greeted by my Parents, my two grandmothers, my grandfather and my brother, after flying for 24 hours with Doris (my other other grandmother!) and taking care of her during the flight…. I think she might like me a bit, if she’s willing to go through all that!
My parents make cute welcome signs
But she did really well, we even went to my parents place and had a little bit of a get-to-know-each-other catchup with my family before heading back to my place.
On her first day in Adelaide we explored the city a bit and got into the sun to help her overcome her Jetlag. So we headed to the best place to catch some sun: the beach!
Unbeknown to her she dressed as a lifesaver, with a bright yellow jumper and red shorts 😆
We were really really lucky though, and we saw a seal at Brighton jetty! Having the time of his life swimming happily around all the people trying to catch fish there.
We spent a fair while watching him, before grabbing some late lunch at E’nuff burgers at Brighton – Reasonably healthy and delicious!
We spent the rest of the day seeing different beaches and even ended up watching the sunset on our first night together in Adelaide, before having dinner at the Thai Orchid at Henley beach.
The next few days she had a chance to recover while I finished my last week at work.
In the evenings we still visited family, having a particularly nice dinner and catchup with my grandparents where we took a lot of photos of the many impressive cacti they have for Manjas Grandparents.
On the work front, it was really bitter sweet finishing up… I have a great new adventure ahead of me but I poured over ten years of my heart and soul into making rsp tick. On my last day the whole company got together to give me a surprise farewell, which was really nice. I will miss the place, and I know they will continue well without me too.
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