Haven’t posted for awhile. We needed a break from constantly being on the road, so we decided to go back to London a week earlier than we needed to be back for apartment hunting and figured we’d enjoy exploring our new city for a bit. A few things didn’t go as hoped:
- The weather was pretty terrible… 50s-60s and often quite damp and windy. It was better than that the second week, but still pretty chilly for June. We’re still not sure what normal is, but this was definitely not great.
- The AirBnB that we were supposed to check into at 4pm let us know at 3:30pm that they had some maintenance issue at our rental and they wanted to “upgrade” us to a different apartment so they could fix it. Turns out the “upgrade” was in a completely different and worse location. There was a lot of back and forth, but ultimately they seemed very shady, so we called AirBnB, explained it to them and they cancelled the booking and refunded us. That left us homeless at ~4:30pm on a Monday sitting with all of our luggage in a pub… We found another place…
- The new place was pretty terrible. Awful furniture, super creaky floors, terrible beds, 20 min away from nearest tube stop. And, we had to stay there for a week.
- We all got sick. It started with Emma, than Lincoln, then Jen, then me. Not fun when travelling and staying in terrible apartments especially.
It wasn’t great, but we made the most of it and did a bunch of fun things – day trip to Greenwich, saw Wicked (again), went to Camden Market, refreshed our clothes from our storage unit, ate a bunch of Asian food including going to Din Thai Fung twice, ordered in a lot and enjoyed having at least a few meals outside of restaurants.
Week two brought some things to look forward to though… First, we started house hunting with our relocation agent. Second, the kids got to spend a day at their new school.
The school day went great – kids enjoyed it and are still excited to go there next fall. Great for them to get to interact with other kids for a full day – they learned Cricket.
House hunting was 2 full days of seeing properties – we must have looked at 15 or so. Unfortunately, it became clear early on that in these neighborhoods (walking distance to school), it was going to be more expensive than we had thought – by a lot. Oh well. The good news is that we did end up finding a great place that reminds us a lot of our house and we think we’ll be very happy there. After too much drama related to making an offer and getting it all nailed down, we’re excited that we’ll be moving in on June 26th and hopefully our rental furniture will arrive then as well!
After we were confident the apartment was happening, we decided to get out of the terrible AirBnBs in London (also stupid expensive), used points to stay a night in a Hyatt hotel (so nice to have a clean room and nice bed!). And then headed back to Italy to try to get healthy and warm while we wait for the apartment to be ready.
Almost 3 months in, the idea of travelling has lost its luster and now feels like a grind. We’re all very excited to have a homebase again.
Lots of pictures:
