We are in Melbourne, Australia

After some sad goodbyes at my mom's house, my brother took us to the airport. The queue was chaos as it seems that everyone wants to visit their Aussie families during the school break. Emily was feeling very fragile and was not handling standing in the queue very well and so I asked if we could book in at the business class desk since we had small kids, at first they said no, but after a few minutes they called us and booked us through. I was quite nervous about our luggage since it was couple of kilos over the weight, but they put everything through without any problem - it probably helped having Emily in tears sitting on the floor. Once through I asked if we could use the special needs passport and security control, and since we had a pram they said it was fine - take note anyone planning to travel overseas with children - always ask, it saved us about an hour of queing.

We finally arrived in Melbourne after a very long, delayed flight. The departure was delayed by 2 hours, first because the cleaning crew had not finished cleaning, then once boarding finally started there was a power outage in the airport - more delay, fortunately we were already on the plane as the boarding process was stopped until the computers were able to reboot. It turns out the cleaning crew was not great, they somehow forgot to empty the toilets, so when we woke up in the morning - no toilets were available, so we had to make an emergency stop in MELBOURNE! No we could not get off the plane, we had to sit there for another 2 hours :-) Then we flew off to Sydney, got off the plane, went through customs without any problems - it probably helped again that my children were both crying (Rom 8:28)...then we booked our luggage in for the local flight to Melbourne (we forgot 1 piece of luggage in Sydney on the turnstyle, this however was delivered to us free of charge - unopened - the next day...AMAZING). Our friends and a coleague of Angus' had to wait at the airport for us for 4 hours.

We were taken to a lovely 2 bedroom apartment that the company is providing for us for 4 weeks, our "welcoming committee" were amazing and provided us with bags full of groceries, flowers, fruit - even chocolate.

We finally got to bed 2 am Aussie time and woke up 11 am - only because we were meeting Deryck and Nadine for lunch at their home - they have been so welcoming and helpful since we arrived.

We have still as yet to conquer the jet lag, Stephen seems to be the only one who gets to sleep through the night, the rest of us only fall asleep after midnight. Tonight should be better as we all woke up alot this morning as Angus had to catch the train to work.

Our apartment is just over the road to a really nice mall, so we walk over every day to explore the different shops and do the groceries. There are alot things that are priced the same as SA, but the food is a lot more expensive - bread R20 - R30 per loaf.

For the guys: we have a rental car to use for the month, it has a 3.5l engine, lots of power to speed up to the 40km/h speed limit:-) It is an automatic as most Aussies prefer them it seems.

Angus started work this morning, so this will be our first normal day, Thursday and Friday we are going to ladies teas in the morning, so that we can meet some friends of friends in the church.

The real search will start now for a place to rent, there seems to be quite a few homes, but most are quite yukky to say the least.

We miss everyone but we are very thankful and excited to be here, will try and keep the blog up to date with our lives if anyone wants to keep tabs on us :-)

Lots of love to all!