PLANNING ON MOVING?
A few years ago we saw in a brochure that a house close to Goulburn Railway Station was for sale. It was also near a shopping centre, even an ALDI store was within easy reach. What more could we want if we planned to move to a more rural area?
We saw our dream come true, namely to sell our present dwelling, buy the new place and end up with something like fifty thousand Dollars saved in the bank! People told us, but Goulburn, this is a bit out of the way, isn’t it?
No, we said, not at all. There’s the Railway Station close by. We hop on the train and are in Sydney in no time. The pensioner excursion trip from Goulburn to Sydney would still cost us only two Dollars and fifty cents! We can even go from Goulburn to Newcastle for our two Dollars fifty!
But you cannot do such a long trip that often, was the objection. We were asked, how often we were then going to see our children. How often do we see them now? We asked back. We pointed out, that we more or less only saw them for birthdays and Christmas anyway. We could still see them on these occasions, when we lived in Goulburn.
So we were all set to make the move to Goulburn, when it suddenly dawned on us, that we could not possibly move to the new place without doing some renovations first. The new place would need some renovations to be done to it! Renovations? You are kidding! Who would want to do renovations at our age! If we paid someone to renovate for us, we’d probably end up with no money left in the bank.
This is the end of the story. We are not going to sell our home and we are not going to move to another place.
March 29, 2013
Yesterday I found this page. I think it was in draft. I was curious what it contained. After reading it, I thought, why not publish it? So here it is.
END OF STORY?
May be it is and may be it isn’t. Basically nothing much has changed since I wrote the above.
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Today is the 17th of July 2017. I come back now to the above story that I published a few years ago in my ABOUT page. Well, over the past years we realized more and more that suitable properties in the Goulburn area would be a bit too dear for us and not worth all the troubles of moving. However, that idea that we could perhaps live in a country area somehow stuck with us. For a while our inquiries were set on Cootamundra, a town in New South Wales, also with a Railway Station on the Sydney to Melbourne line. Quite likable properties were significantly cheaper than comparable properties here a bit to the south of Sydney. We checked out quite a lot of properties on the internet. Once Peter and I even stayed in a hotel in the main street of Cootamundra. We did get a very good impression of that little town. People there seemed to be all very friendly towards strangers. We thought that this was a place that we could definitely like. We thought it was feasible for us to live there. But in the end it turned out we were really not determined enough to initiate some steps towards moving.
A few years have passed. Since both Peter and I are past eighty now, should we really stop thinking of moving to a different area? And a country area at that that we are not used to at all. So, we are in old age now. But we still love to travel, We also love to go for family visits. However, with each year we may find it a bit harder to do all this. For how long can we keep it up really, all this moving about?
We have just been on a visit to Benalla in Victoria, seeing our son Martin who recently moved to Benalla. This is a beautiful thriving little country town, also on the Sydney to Melbourne train line! Properties are less than half the price of the properties here in our area in the Illawarra! Of course, alone the likelihood of being able to purchase at a reasonable price a good property in Benalla , and that our son lives there now in his own house, made us think that maybe we could move there too.
Yes, we could, and we could not. Medical facilities, yes they are available. It would however be a question whether they would be the right kind of facilities for the treatments that Peter requires. We would have to find out. Also, we would need a lot of help with actually moving and sorting everything out. Of course, we could afford to pay for a professional removalist. Maybe we would have to get rid of some of our old furniture and things that we do not need any more. And then we could buy something new for the new place. Could we cope with all this? Is it worth it to undertake a move like this at our age? The more we doubt, the more years pass, and in the end we’ll really be toooo old for all this!
In the meantime we had another great-grandchild, a boy called Carter, He was born on the 21st of November 2016. He is the son of granddaughter Roxy and of Scott. Yesterday we had a family celebration at the Illawarra Yacht Club. Little Carter was there with his mum, grandparents, his cousins and lots of aunts. Carter is a very huge and very friendly baby. The family celebrations were for Lucas, who is going to be five tomorrow on Tuesday. Alexander, the younger brother of Lucas, as well as Lucas did like to play with their cousin Carter. It was lovely to see the three boys together.
Some presents arrived for Lucas at the Illawarra Yacht Club.
