Look-see-decide trip - Part 3

A couple of personal observations and opinions about our trip:

We found eating out more expensive than we expected(we were comparing to our last trip which was 6 years ago, so I guess that's to be expected).  We didn't eat in any "fancy" restaurants, mainly sticking to pub meals when eating out and on average paid roughly £12 to £14 for a meal., excluding drinks.

We bought a couple of heat-in-the-microwave type meals from supermarkets and found their quality to be really good and the price reasonable.

We didn't notice too many sushi restaurants in the towns we visited.  We did pop into a sushi chain-type restaurant and were a little under-awed by the sushi... it wasn't a patch on our local sushi joint.

Groceries on the whole seemed more reasonably priced than at home.  The price of clothes varied a lot - Primark prices were very reasonable and the quality surprisingly good (I bought a pair of PJs which compared favourably quality-wise with Woolies at home, which surprised me)

If you have any type of food intolerance you are very well catered for in the UK with large sections of the supermarket aisles dedicated to gluten-free etc.

I'm vegetarian and I was blown away by the choices on offer for "veggies" in the UK.  The Quorn cold meat and cocktail sausages are SERIOUSLY yummy.

The drivers are on the whole much more considerate and obey the rules of the road.  There are a lot more traffic circles.

We found more traffic-jams than we expected on the roads and a LOT more cyclists.  The Guildford/Send area was particularly bad for traffic jams.

The people working in the shops were in general very friendly, particularly the till-operators in the supermarkets.  We also noticed a number of older people working in supermarkets.

I was under the impression that most of the charity shops sold furniture, but I didn't find this to be true.  Having said that, the Heart Foundation charity shop we went into had amazing furniture at good prices.  We also saw lots of bargains on Facebook marketplace.

The towns we visited were incredibly clean and tidy.

Compared to the last time we visited the UK, we found that many of the High Streets looked a bit "dead" with mainly charity shops, but not much else.  We also noticed a number of pubs closed down.  I think the mall-culture is hitting the UK, which I'm personally sad about.

The dogs in the UK are extremely well-behaved and silent.

The pigeons are HUGE.

We noticed a lot more biltong for sale compared to our last visit.

Cell-phone signal is very patchy and on the whole not as good as in SA.

The towns seem to get prettier the further you get from London.

Look-see-decide trip Part 2

We had 3 weeks in the UK and split it up roughly into: a week to explore the area in which we plan to settle, a week-end in the Cotswolds, 5 days with our close friends in Send, Surrey and a week spent relaxing in Dorset.  Roxy was only with us for the first week, as she couldn't be away from her family for more than that.

In our first week we visited Tring, Great Missenden (that's the area we plan to settle in) Saffron Walden, Cambridge, Chelmsford and we also spent a day in London (Grant had an interview there).

Some of the roads in rural Buckinghamshire were VERY narrow!

Evening walk in the forest near Aldbury

The Thames, near our hotel in the Cotswolds

Bourton-on-the-water

Provence?  Nope Mayfield Lavender Farm in Surrey!!

A deer chilling in Richmond Park

picnic-style lunch in Kingston-upon-Thames

Beautiful Dorset

Durdle Door, Dorset...soooo beautiful!

West Bay, Dorset

Apologies for the weird spacing on this post, I have no idea why blogger hates me this way....

UK "Look-see-decide" trip - June 2018 PART 1

We had a really good, informative and in some ways, unexpected, trip to England in June.  Our flight was uneventful, and we landed on time at Gatwick.  Once we'd been through immigration control we  immediately found a newsagent at the airport and bought sim cards for our phones.  We settled on EE cards as they had a good deal for international calls and we wanted to be able to contact our family in SA every day.  Next stop was Europ cars to pick up our hire car and then we were finally on the road to Send in Surrey, to the home of our close friends.  

It was at this point that I had my first "wobbly".  We have visited the UK pretty frequently in the last 20 years, so if you had asked me before this whether I understood what it would be like to live there I would have said a definite "Yes" - I mean I've stayed in the home of my friends regularly, acted like a local, visited many supermarkets, shopped up a storm, been to London regularly, even spent a week on a narrowboat.  England feels like home.  Right?  Wrong.  On that drive from Gatwick Airport to Send, I suddenly got hit by a wave of sheer panic.  I kept thinking "WHAT are we thinking, planning to move here?  I can't do this!  I really, really can't do this!  I don't even want to do this!"  

I've thought about it a lot and I've come to the conclusion that, in the past when we've come to England, I've WANTED it to feel foreign, I've embraced the differences in culture, accents, money, food and scenery - when you go on an overseas holiday you WANT it to be different from home, that's the very reason that you travel.  BUT when you are going to a place with the intention of living there.... you want it to feel like home, you want it to feel familiar and comfortable.  At that moment all my eyes were seeing were the things that were different, unusual and unexpected.  The strange accents, strange bank notes, strange customs and ... strange SIM cards... were an assault on my senses that I really didn't want or need right then.  It took a couple of days before I managed to re-discover the enthusiasm I had originally felt about the big move.  

After spending a few days with our friends in Send, we set off to Tring.  This is where the next unexpected thing happened.  Before we left home, we had pretty much settled on Tring as the place we were going to live.  Our visit to Tring went very well, we found a lovely school for our granddaughter, liked the look of the place and all was good.  

Then, we took a drive to High Wycombe as that is the town where our daughter, Paula, has been accepted to university to do her Masters.  As we were driving to High Wycombe we past through an area on the outskirts of the town... something about it appealed to me... REALLY appealed to me.... so I mentioned that it was lovely, my daughter, Roxy, then piped up from the backseat that she thought it was amazing.... silence.... eventually I said "maybe it would be a nice place to settle?".... silence.... Roxy then said that she thought it would be a lovely place to live.  My poor, long-suffering, husband Grant then said.... " you guys can't be serious?!"  Rox and I shot a look at each other and then gleefully told him "we are!"  Major change of plan!  We found a coffee shop, hauled out our phones, found schools, parks, pubs, areas of interest.... all the things that had taken me months to investigate at home, we managed to do in about half an hour in the coffee shop! We had a good look around, visited a school, had lunch in a pub, and decided that this was our place.  Even Grant had to agree :-)