Time to say goodbye

We are moving out today! Hannah and I have been busy cleaning and packing our place (Serenity) last whole week. We moved into Serenity on July 2009, and after nearly 7 years, we are moving on. We will be moving to Chicago (in fact ,we have already signed our lease for the new apartment!). We are very excited about the new place, and we have planned a nice, cosy room for family and friends’ visits. However, meantime, we need to pass the final house inspection so that we can get all our housing bond back. 

We started packing about 1 week ago. It was very hard, especially for Hannah, because we only have budget for moving half the items we brought from US. This means that she has to give up lots of books, clothes, shoes and yarn. We have firstly brought A LOT of stuffs from US because we had this impression that most things in NZ are going to be very expensive. We are not wrong, but also it was a bit too dramatic (in my opinion). Eventually, after several days of negotiation and planning, we narrowed it down to 3 suitcases, 1 black plastic box and 1 wooden chest. Hannah bought the wooden chest in NZ, and it has exquisite cravings on it, and EVERYONE had told her that she NEEDS to bring that back with her to US - so the chest is coming with us! The suitcases and boxes contain books, yarns, some nice pieces of knitting from family, dive gears etc. All these items are going to be shipped and it will take approximately 12 - 16 weeks. It will give us sometime to get settle down in Chicago and find places to store all the items.

Meantime, back to the harsh reality of cleaning and more cleaning :( . Hannah did most of the cleaning - mopping the floor, cleaning the walls and shower etc. I am in charge of dusting (because Hannah is highly allergic to dust!), and driving around donating things to op-shops and throwing away bulk rubbish to transfer station. Between all the dusting and cleaning, we were holding a garage sale in order to get as much back from all our valuables… and at the end of the day, we earn $925!

Nelly (the estate manager) came with Sandie and Ken (the house owners) at around 2pm. Nelly inspected the house with Hannah, while I spend some time talking to Sandie and Ken around out future plans, how much we love the house, how we named it Serenity etc. We gave a bag of green tea to Sandie and Ken, and a bottle of Michigan maple syrup to Nelly. Ken helped us took a last photo on the deck, and Hannah snapped a last picture of Serenity as we pulled out of the driveway. Time to say goodbye - Hannah said goodbye to Serenity as her eyes starting welling-up. 

We packed our remaining of our luggages (we have left the main checked-in luggage with Selena) in the van, with Jet and Lilith, we are ready for the next part of our journey in NZ. However, we need to officially say goodbye to Waiheke as well, and there is no better way than to spend an afternoon sipping wine at Man-O-War Bay! After a nice bottle of white wine at Man-O-War bay, we had dinner at The Cove (own by Julia, the next tenant of Serenity!…such a coincidence!), and spend the night at Surfdale beach. Tomorrow, we will start our journey!

(Disclaimer: there may be grammatical and spelling errors in this post and posts in upcoming weeks because we are on the move and have limited internet access. Therefore, we need to try to do all our "internet things" on our phone 3G network. We will have to be more efficient in order not to use our limited access up before the month!...so bear with us).