26 Oct 2018

We’ve always wanted to go travelling again, ever since we met 10 years ago in Sydney. After years of planning, which included investing into buying a flat (to have something to show for our years of work in our twenties), we’re finally ready!
Now, the plan was to buy a used car and drive all our stuff over to Germany to store it at my family’s house, since German houses tend to have more storage room i.e. space in the basement, compared to English houses. We booked flights from Frankfurt to Colombo, Sri Lanka, our first stop on our adventure!
So far so good, we bought a used Chrysler Voyager, big enough to fit all our bits and pieces in it…. However, disaster struck and the car stopped working just when we were planning on driving to Germany beginning of October 2018. After several mechanics evaluation (and more money spend on it) apparently the fuel pump was the issue, however with it being an American car and spare parts hard to come by and also us being short on time we decided not to throw any more money down the drain and get it scrapped.

So to plan B – to store our stuff at Sam’s family’s house in England and fly over to Germany. Two days before our flight we still had most of our boxes in the flat and hadn’t even started cleaning –  panic time!! At this point I also need to mention that our flat is located on the third floor without a lift. The amount of times we walked up and down the stairs in those last days in England should have really gotten us into shape for travelling, screw the gym, but German beer and too much food before we finally made it onto the plane to Sri Lanka meant all the effort was for naught – oops!

On the morning of our own personal Brexit, meaning we were flying out to Germany in the afternoon, we still had to drive the old furniture to the dump, clean all the windows, hoover, scrub the bathroom and the inside of the cupboards – oh and of course catch a plane in time. Needless to say it was a crazy few days, everything that could have gone wrong with our move out of England, did go wrong – and to top it all the flight to Germany was delayed too… Britain did not want to let us go!

In the end we just about made it, even though we probably lost years of our life packing all that stress into such a short amount of time. In Germany we could finally start to relax a little, catch up with family and friends and welcome my little nephew into this world!     
Here a before and after pic of the flat (and bear in mind, this is just the living room):