Laci is Employed; A Celebratory Road Trip Ensues

As of a week ago today, I’m officially employed! So, clearly a celebration was in order for my final week of unemployment, and since Regis should be starting his new position soon as well. This week is also the last official week of summer (the first day of fall here was the first), so with the amazing sunny weather, we decided to re-do the Great Ocean Road. We did a little tour when we were here last year but had cold, rainy weather. It was much more enjoyable this time around. Thanks to Scott for letting us borrow his car! :)

Before I get into that, I’m pretty excited to land a job! I actually started interviewing with this company while we were still in Charlotte – the first time they called me was a little awkward; it was 1am my time because they didn’t realize I hadn’t moved over yet, but we moved past that and I think it will be a pretty good fit for me! I’ll be doing communications and project work for a financial communications company. Is it my dream job? Probably not, but I will have 6 weeks of paid time off per year and it will give me great project management experience. It’s also a huge step in the right direction for me in the fact that my degree will be of somewhat good use since it's in my field - I can sort of justify my huge amount of student loan debt. Haha. To be honest, other than being a travel writer, photographer, or bartender on an island somewhere, I don’t really have a dream job anyway.

So, our road trip! The Great Ocean Road is a 243-kilometer-long road on the Southeastern coast of Australia in Victoria. It starts in Torquay, which is an internationally-renowned location for surfing, and ends in Allansford. For the entire stretch, there are gorgeous views of the forest, the Great Otway National Park, beaches, and windy roads. Regis loves driving on fun roads and I like looking at everything, so it works out pretty well for both of us. There are cute beach towns and breathtaking landmarks every so often, so it's a pretty fun weekend trip. 

Torquay Beach

We started out by driving from the city to Torquay, which takes about an hour and a half. We stayed there overnight in an Airbnb I found the day before (yay, tax return money!). Our parents think we are nuts for staying in random peoples' houses while they're home, but it's pretty interesting and also great if you're on a budget! The host made us breakfast and everything, and it was a really close walk to the beach and restaurants in the area. We ate more seafood than I have ever consumed at a time that evening. It was glorious.

<3

The next morning, we packed up and headed out. We stopped in Apollo Bay for some lunch and a little shopping. We went to a cool little brewpub for lunch and walked around on the beach there, which is really beautiful. We didn't do as much exploring as we could have last year since it was absolutely freezing and we were ill-prepared for the weather, so this was really nice.

Apollo Bay

After that, we continued driving and decided to stop at a wildlife park along the road for some kangaroo and koalas! I was pretty disappointed there weren't any koalas, since the animal sanctuary last year didn't have them either, but there was no shortage of cute animals! We got to hang out with some goats, sheep and wallabies in a petting area, and there were other ones outside of there too. I fed some goats and got chased after by an intimidating emu. Emus terrify me and this one was no joke! He scared me so much I dropped the bag of animal food I was carrying around, then he proceeded to eat all of it. What a jerk!

After that, we drove along the road and checked out a few of the amazing landmarks. We skipped the 12 Apostles, mainly because we saw them last year and because there were about 10 tour buses full of people there that we didn't feel like dealing with. Since we live so close, this trip will probably be a more regular thing for us, so we aren't worried about missing out! We checked out the London Bridge and Bay of Martyrs this time around - two landmarks we missed out on last time since we were in more of a hurry. They did not disappoint - these photos hardly do them justice! We hung out on the beach for awhile and watched some very brave paddle boarders before packing up and driving back to Lorne, where we stayed for the night. 

London Bridge

Bay of Martyrs

We had planned our final day to be our chill beach day, but it was pretty overcast, so after we had some breakfast, we headed to Erskine Falls, which is right outside of Lorne. This was the second waterfall I have ever seen in person and it was so amazing. In our typical fashion, we ignored the "do not climb over the fence" signs so I could get a better photo! 

Erskine Falls

After that, we stopped at a winery before heading home. Victoria, along with many other parts of Australia, is extremely well known for producing great wines. I actually know nothing about wine, other than the fact I like white wine and Regis likes red wine, so going to wineries and doing tastings is pretty fun and informational for both of us. I also had my first spider encounter while exploring the vineyard!

Ugh. :(

All in all, it was a great way to spend some of our last few days of unemployment. I start my new job on Monday and Regis is starting the week after. We probably won't have much time off before the end of the year. Hopefully this inspires a few of our friends to visit! :)

-L

We Aren't Living Out of Our Bags Anymore! Exclamation!

So I realized I haven't updated you guys in a while. We've officially been here a little over a month, which is pretty exciting and also a little terrifying, haha. I actually am starting to feel like I live here - it just felt like an expensive vacation for awhile. Also, we forgot to mention in previous posts that after the disaster of flying here, the airline actually LOST all of our bags, then ended up delivering them to us a few days later.

It's been mostly really good. Regis is excited he will be starting work soon, which is awesome. We finally got to unpack our crap after almost two months of living out of our suitcases and sleeping in friends' or family members' spare bedrooms (Shout out to Scott, my brother Luke and Regis' parents!). We finally have our own bed - FYI, Ikea pillows are no bueno! The neighborhood we live in is really nice and it's close to a couple train stations and tram stops, so getting around is super easy. Another great bonus is a beautiful park is about a block away and we are REALLY close to the beach. Did you know the beach is my favorite thing ever? It basically is - Regis is a close second :)

Caulfield Park - Complete with a cool duck pond!

St Kilda Festival

I have almost gotten used to biking on the street here - it's absolutely something I never did in Charlotte, mostly because of the lack of both bike lanes and NC driver skills. Now I can bike to the beach in about 15 or so minutes, which will be great! I really like getting the cool beach vibe along with living in a huge city - Regis and I are both super ADD people that need lots of activity options and this place has not been disappointing thus far. Plus, PENGUINS! (Don't worry, there's a penguin picture in this post!)

I think the only issues I have (and probably will for a while) are the loneliness factor and the fear of the unknown. I have pulled out my phone a few times to text one of my friends from Charlotte to hang out without thinking before quickly realizing they're about 10,000 miles away recently. We only know about five people here, which is a great beginning (I knew one person when I moved to NC) but it is definitely lonely going from a large group of friends to this. It's obviously something I knew we'd have to deal with and I'm sure will subside eventually. Our new roommate seems cool, which is a good start! All 3 of us went out for Valentines Day the other night, and it was a blast.

Valentines Day drinks!

The fear of the unknown thing is a bit more difficult to put into words and is something I'm a bit hesitant to share - basically it's been something I have been dealing with since several months before we left. I'm going to start off by saying I am generally a super relaxed person and my motto has always been "worrying doesn't accomplish anything, so why bother".

I developed some pretty bad anxiety during the fall. I always used to think it was something that people made up for attention, but it is something a lot of people silently struggle with, and to be frank, kind of sucks to deal with. I had a few panic attacks at work, then a few outside of it that gradually got worse - it was quite miserable and I was terrified of how they were affecting me. To make a long story short - I went to the doctor, got a short term solution in the form of a medication I would normally never take and thought everything would magically go away when we got here.

It mostly did, but comes back every now and then when I worry about someone not calling for a job, or thinking of possible short term plans so I have some kind of backup, or our place STILL being on the market, or basically just freaking out in general about uprooting all of our shit and moving here - and everything I hoped went away will just start. I think until I begin and am adjusted to whatever job I'll end up with, it's going to be something I'll have to deal with. I guess I just wanted to vent about this because I'm sure my Instagram posts and snapchats of the beach make all my friends back home think everything is always perfect. Nope!

We chose to take this outrageously insane (but VERY planned out) risk, and I'm absolutely positive we're both going to look back at these struggles a year from now and say that this move is the best decision we've ever made.

I mean come on... PENGUINS, right? :)

Adorable.

Regis here, been a minute

So Laci called me out for creating this blog that I haven’t really been posting to.  I guess this blog post is to appease her and say “hey look I wrote a couple”.  The real reason I haven’t wrote anything is that I haven’t really had anything to write about.  Life has been pretty much wake up, apply for jobs, do something outside, drink a beer, sleep, repeat.  Up until this point we have been living as cheaply as possible due to the fact that we have no income.  We have actually become quite good at finding dinner and drink specials to lessen the blow.  But that’s about to change, very soon!  Quite simply, I accepted a job offer!  And Laci should know shortly if her or the other candidate got chosen for her job to.  But enough about Laci, back to me! 

I was offered a job at Monash University in the Maintenance Technology Institute.  I know that sounds like I’m going to be fixing shit that breaks on campus but that’s not at all what I will be doing.  The MTI is a research and development standalone on campus that works with around a dozen mining companies across Australia, China, and South Africa.  Their job is to implement sensors and data acquisition onto excavators and drag lines to monitor the performance and stress that the machines see.  My job will be 2 fold, first I will have to travel to the different mining sites to install these systems and troubleshoot any problems.  Second, when I am not traveling I will be analysing data back at the Monash Clayton Campus.

To those of you who know me through FSAE this probably seems kind of comical and to be honest I agree with you.  For everyone else, this whole "lets move to Australia" thing started due to an alliance between my FSAE team and the one at Monash.  Long boring story, but you can all blame Scott Wordley for Laci and I moving to Oz, and now I can thank him for helping me get a job here. 

Things are starting to finally seem like they are going our way, especially after the disaster of traveling here.  We will be moving out of Scott’s house on Saturday into a flat share apartment we found on Flatmates.com.au.  Now if only someone would buy our lovely 1-bedroom condo on the 30^th floor of a prime residential building in Charlotte.  Its furnished and has amazing views from the floor to ceiling windows and balcony.  It even has a pool and a car parking space.  It could be yours for the price of $260,000.00.  Please feel free to find it on Zillow.com and if so inclined schedule a viewing. 

Just in case you weren’t clear, that last sales pitch was supposed to be funny, unless your actually in the market.

Regis

Ps. I don’t have any cool photos to share.  I’m not Laci, I don’t take photos.

Week One Is In the Books!

So, we survived our 55 hours of traveling and finally made it! As inconvenient as that was, it was more than worth it.

Brighton Beach

The weather here is great - it's pretty normal for summer weather here to vary from 20-30 (70F - 100F) - sometimes even higher, but it's not humid so it feels great. Definitely a nice change compared to the Ohio winter we got to 'enjoy' for a few weeks!

There are obviously some differences here compared to the US, some of them great, some of them not so great, most of them pretty insignificant, so I thought I'd list them out since we have had some questions from family and friends. This list isn't all-inclusive and it's not really in a logical order, but here are some of my thoughts:

The Awesome: 

• The weather (already covered)
• Most of the food doesn't contain a zillion preservatives - the bread here is AMAZING
• My new personal favorite - the iced coffee! I don't know why, but they use ice cream instead of just ice. It's not healthy, but DAMN it is fantastic!

Iced coffee!

• Some of the phrases people use are amazing - i.e. 'chillybin' for beer cooler and 'lollies' for candy
• The TV/radio/news are not censored at all - and the music on the radio is actually good!
• Similarly, the government is not controlled by religion like it is in the States
• There is an actual blend of cultures here, and everyone is fine with it. Regis and I both have said this is probably the melting pot scenario America was aiming for but didn't quite do 
• The beaches!

Jumping Rock Beach - Mornington Peninsula

Regis enjoying his beach beer

• Lots of our favorite musicians tour here pretty often - we are actually headed to a festival this weekend!

Laneway Music Festival - picture from last year

• Using Celsius and the Metric System isn't that bad - they actually make way more sense once you are used to it
• The public transit system here is great - between trains, trams and buses, you can get basically anywhere in the cities or suburbs you want pretty easily. It takes around 30 minutes to get to one of the beaches!
• People make a way bigger deal of recycling here
• Wine is SUPER cheap since so much of it is made in the region
• People here aren't in a hurry to grow up - it is not common at all here for 22-23 year olds to get married and people are really weirded out by why people in the US do it
• In addition to my last point, when you meet someone new here, their first question isn't "What do you do?" - this really annoyed me in Charlotte
• My cell phone plan is $40 a month. WAY cheaper than back home!
• The minimum wage here is around $17 an hour, so tipping anywhere is not expected

The Not-So-Awesome

• It's really hard to sleep past 8am because of loud-ass prehistoric sounding birds. Some of them are so loud, they actually sound like people screaming. WTF?!
• Getting a phone number here was quite a process and it required a lot of legal documentation
• The hot weather is great, but the sun is insane.. I have never been a person to wear sunscreen (don't lecture me!), but if I don't put on at least SPF 30-50 here, my skin will scorch.
• Tacos are all but non existent. Tacos are also one of my three main food groups. :(
• 75% of restaurants here only serve pizza or burgers (I actually saw a restaurant called Pizza vs Burgers, very competitive thinking!)
• Certain items are SO expensive:

• 2 liter of Coca Cola: $5
• 6 pack of beer: $16
• Eggs: $5-$8 - Also, they are not refrigerated at the store
• Above-mentioned iced coffee: $6 (at least the price will keep me from getting fat from all the ice cream?)
• Housing - ~$1500-$3000 a month, depending on where in the city the apt is
• It's pretty evident we aren't from here as soon as one of us speaks - it's not necessarily bad, but people will immediately ask us if we are the Trump-voting type of Americans 
• Housing is extremely competitive here - places will sometimes only list for a few days. In Charlotte, there was a huge overabundance of housing so this was never an issue for us
• The ocean water is absolutely freezing, and there are jellyfish! 

Altogether, though, we love it here. My Not-So-Awesome list doesn't contain any deal breakers. Charlotte was pretty expensive too, and the way of life here is definitely what we were looking for. So far we have each had a job interview, I have another next week and we should have our own place sometime within the week or so. 

We get to celebrate our first Australia Day here tomorrow, too! Regis will provide the next update soon. 

-L

Our Flight Landed in Melbourne... Without Us!

We are currently on day two of our trip to our new home, in the San Francisco airport during a nine hour layover.

To be clear, there wasn't supposed to be a day two or a ridiculous layover; last night our trip took an unexpected turn from a 26  hour journey involving three flights to a 53 hour journey involving six flights and a surprise night in a hotel close to LAX.

This is definitely a pretty disheartening beginning to our move. We started out yesterday with crying parents and a HUGE hassle checking our bikes. After we finally got through okay, we were so excited.. We got a few celebratory beers and decided we would get lunch/dinner at our next connection - definitely a bad move in hindsight. We ended up going about 15 hours without food because of delayed flights and waiting in endless customer service lines to switch out our flights that were missed due to delays, then sprinting to barely catch our new connections. Because of the delay from Dallas to LAX, we missed the chance to board our Melbourne flight by about 15 minutes.

Check out the huge stack of tickets we have from all the changes:

That doesn't even include our new San Francisco > Sydney flight or the Sydney > Melbourne. We will probably avoid American Airlines in the future, to be honest. I have rarely used this airline without a long, unexpected delay. We spent a ton of time booking these flights and even paid extra to avoid excessive layovers for this very reason.

We are trying not to dwell on this longer than today, though. We have beautiful, sunny weather to look forward to pretty soon and it will be Saturday by the time we arrive. See you on the other side of the world!

-L

Six Days to Go - The Countdown Continues..

Only about a week till we are in transit to the world's most liveable city! :)  So, of course, being the usually not serious person I am, I'll start my first post off with a sappy one..

Leaving here (again) won't be easy, but it's always been inevitable.

From the time I was super young, all I really knew I wanted to do with my life was to get far away from Ohio. The location I've wanted to relocate to has changed many times over the years (it's actually quite a list), but settling where I was raised has never been an option. Even my parents told me early on in school, "Do well in school so you can go to college, get a good job and get the hell out of here." Despite many people telling me that leaving here is 'impossible', I did exactly that almost three years ago. I moved to Charlotte, got a great job, and felt truly successful. So here we are.

We have six days till we board our one way flight to Melbourne and I have so many thoughts and feelings swirling in my head. Excited, nervous anxious, ecstatic, exhausted, accomplished... and sad.

Despite our excitement to leave for Melbourne, leaving Charlotte was the hardest decision we (speaking for Regis too because I know it's true) have ever made in our lives, and it was really the first large decision we have made in our three year relationship. The visa process we had to go through was no joke. Factor in listing our condo (it's listed now if you're in the market!) and quitting our (actually REALLY good) jobs; it's not been an easy past few months. We have had tons of support from friends, which has been great, but we have also been faced with constant questioning from some as to why we are doing this. It's been extremely trying. Regis and I have different life goals than a lot of people, and it's hard to explain to people that don't know us very well.

I know I am also going to go crazy missing my brother and sister - they are both such awesome people I'm going to miss so much. None of us have lived in the same place since they were in high school, so we rarely get to see each other. I've had a blast hanging out with them since I've been home temporarily and I know it's going to be an extremely emotional goodbye.

Leaving Ohio was a no-brainer, I hated it there when I left for NC and still have no problem leaving it now. But I am going to miss life in Charlotte and my friends and family both there and here... a lot.

Nothing truly great comes easily, though. This opportunity is once in a lifetime. It's beyond stupid not to take it and run with it. Melbourne is by far the most beautiful and vibrant place I have ever been, and it's also the first city I've visited where I felt like I truly belonged and wanted to settle. Regis fell in love with it too, and we spent our entire flight back figuring out a plan to get back there as soon as humanly possible. We are so excited to start this adventure together!

We had been aiming to get out of Charlotte by summer 2017 - both of us moved there with the intention of leaving somewhere we wanted to go together. This location is just a little further away than originally planned. Let's go :)

-L