The Big Move

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HELLO! Long time no see! Welcome back to the blog. I’m not sure if a "travel" blog still stands because now I’ll be living in another country rather than holidaying, but I’m sure we’ll be doing plenty of travelling so, just personally, I think it still counts. I was umming and ahhing about whether I should post daily or weekly, and I have decided to be sporadic about it. Just gonna have to keep your eye out! Gotta keep you on your toes somehow.

Now, it's most likely that you'd only be reading this if you know the situation, but for anyone who doesn't- hi! I'm Lucy, and I have just moved to the UK with my two best pals, Trudi and Bec. We're moving to London, but stopping to have a little holiday in Scotland with family first- because why not?! My issue now is- where to begin? I suppose I'll start with the 28th of December, the day we left Australia, which was a very emotional day. I won’t even bother going into the details of the airport goodbye, as I’m sure you can imagine how many tears there were (looking at you, Max). So I’ll skip to the bit where we were finally heading off, just the three of us, on our new exciting adventure. As soon as we left our families we went through security, each of us standing in line just absolutely blubbering. Bec decided, rightfully so, that it was a perfect time for a picture, so we took a teary-eyed, face-mask-clad selfie (that bit is important for later), and headed through security.

Of course, the body scanner machine thought I was trying to smuggle something in my shoes- although I must not look like a very sketchy person because the man doing the scanning seemed VERY surprised when it flagged me. A lovely woman patted me down and found nothing and we all had a laugh and all was merry. UNTIL. We headed through the passport scanners where trouble awaited. A group of border security officers with their big scary guns and walkie talkies were waiting for us- US specifically. One approached us and we had the most embarrassing conversation of our entire lives.



Officer: ma’am you took a photo over there before, I need to see it to make sure you didn’t get any of us in it

Bec: ohmygod I'm so sorry here I’ll just delete it it’s fine

*Officer peering into the picture*

Bec: we just thought it would be funny to take a picture of us all crying but it's a bit embarrassing now

Officer: why are you all crying? You’re going on holiday

All 3 of us stammering: oh no well- we’re actually- we’re moving overseas- just said goodbye- parents upstairs-

Officer: okay that’s pretty funny, it’s all good. Have a nice move.



And we walked away MORTIFIED. But our pain soon ceased as we traipsed through duty free (which is an actual ghost town, it’s really very sad) and made our way through the airport to wait for our plane. Now, if duty free was a ghost town, the rest of the airport was… a really... serious... ghost town (??) because absolutely nothing was open, except for one Plaza Premium Lounge. So UNFORTUNATELY we just HAD to pay entry for there. How awful. It’s usually $60 for two hours but since there’s hardly anyone around we only had to pay $35 and could stay until our plane was called to board! We settled in with a g&t and some croissants (don’t ask what propelled us to make that choice, we were feeling quite unstable), and went about trying to cheer ourselves up by listing the things we were most excited about for the upcoming two years.

Soon enough it was time to board and upon take off we realised there weren’t that many people on the plan. The flight attendant said we could spread out if we wanted to, so we each ended up with a row to ourselves!! Easiest 15 hour flight I have ever endured. Dinner, sleep, breakfast, sleep, land. Perfecto. At one point when I woke up, the plane was so quiet, the lights were almost completely off, and I looked out the window to see a sky just completely littered with stars. It really felt like we could have been in space, and it seemed like all the world's problems were lightyears away.

We only had 2 hours at our stopover in Doha before our 8 hour flight to Edinburgh, and they went very quickly. This time Bec ended up having another row to herself and Trude and I had an extra seat in between us, so very spacious! It was halfway through this second flight that we started to get very bored. My eyes got too dry to watch anything on the screen, and they had dimmed the windows (side note here! I have never ever seen a plane without window shutters and instead with automatic dimmers so that you can still see outside but it’s a very deep dark blue. So cool.) so much that I couldn't read. And yes, yes, I could have turned on my overhead light, but you just never want to be *that* person, you know? Towards the end of the flight they handed out these little veggie curry roll puff things which were so good Trudi asked if they had any more. The flight attendant said no but then 10 minutes later came back with one! We split it in half and sat there munching away, the happiest little adventurers you ever did see.

Anyway, we FINALLY landed, and immediately after stepping off the plane into the terminal we felt that crisp, cold Scottish air, and held back tears of joy. The rest of the airport drama is pretty mundane, the usual walking, waiting, stammering over why I'm in the country on a visa, and more waiting. Trudi did an olympics-worthy sprint across the airport when she saw a man take Bec's bag off the carousel- imagine the distraught if she hadn't caught him! When we did eventually make it outside, after an extremely casual customs control of a man just nodding at us as we walked through, we were ecstatic. The air, the drizzle, the line of taxis, and the accents all combined made us shriek with excitement. We hopped in a taxi, gleefully recited the address, and stared out the frosty window for the next 30 minutes, unable to believe how lucky we are.

So, the current COVID rules are that we need to isolate until we receive a negative test, so that is what we've been doing for the past two days! Lots of singing, cooking, hanging our heads out the window, dancing, sleeping, and movie-watching going on. We got to go for a walk this morning to the postbox to send away our covid tests which was very exciting! Very crisp and cold outside, we couldn't be happier. Sorry to rub it in, Queensland.

But anyway that's pretty much it for now! I'm sure there'll be much more to post as soon as we're allowed out of the house, so keep your eyes peeled. Ciao for now!

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