It’s a Goa!

Today marks the second anniversary of the day we left England for the first leg of our travels in Goa, India. Two years ago we were larking around with Sam in London before making our way to Heathrow and seeing Jeremy Sheffield (the bloke from Holby City, the Natalie Imbruglia music video and the Renault Clio advert) standing in the queue for security.

Now we’ve been back for six months, not in Manchester but the Shire. I’ve been working as a Technical Author again (something I didn’t think would happen) for about four months now and Tace starts her new childrenswear design job in a couple of weeks after a stint as an administrator at the Environment Agency helping to save the planet.

What’s changed since we’ve been away? If you want a telly it’s got to be a flat screen one and they cost rather more than the old fashioned variety. Hair-gel-and-thick-tie-knot ‘executives’ are driving Audis instead of BMWs. Petrol and diesel are ridiculously expensive and at one point the price seemed to be rising on a daily basis. House prices (as I predicted) are coming down but they’re still ludicrously high. Public transport seems to have improved and cities and town centres seem cleaner. We’ve got a recession on our hands (as I predicted) but I wonder if we will ever fall back to the level of the early 1990s when vast retail parks stood empty and you could buy a house for £30,000.

I was really dreading coming back. I was expecting everything to be costly, the roads to be terminally congested and the weather to be cold and rainy. I’ve been pleasantly surprised really. A weekly grocery shop doesn’t set us back as much as expected (being used to Australian prices it seems cheap here). Bedfordshire roads seem to be nicely free-flowing. The weather has been a lot better than expected. I sit here writing this in early October and outside is blue skies and sunshine. Since I got my job I have been cycling the 11 mile round trip to work and back along a disused railway line. I only have to use about 400 metres of quiet country road in my whole journey and it’s a delightful ride along a river, through farms, woodland, a country park and past a couple of lakes. There’s plenty of wildlife to see and it’s interesting to watch the changing seasons and the farms at work as I cycle by. And you know what? It’s only rained on me once. I got a serious soaking that day – luckily it was on my way home where I could take my time getting dry.

Having experienced living out of a backpack and an old VW van we’re keeping our lives simple these days. We couldn’t have timed it better, to having paid off all our debts and learned to live a simple life puts us in a very good position to weather this recession. We also know that no matter how bad it gets we have found plenty of beautiful - and most importantly very cheap - cheap bolt holes where we can escape the misery (although have you seen the price of flights lately?).

Hi to everyone who’s followed the blog and who we met along on the way. Here’s to the last two years. Who knows what the next two years will bring.