Well once again, it has been far too long since we have updated.  No excuses, as always, but now we finally have the time, energy and something interesting to write home about.

On January 9, 2013 we arrived to Moreton Island’s Tangalooma Island Resort with the intention of working our asses off for 3-6 months to save money like crazy.  We knew it wasn’t going to be a lot of fun, as we had hoped to work as many hours as possible to maximize our commitment to coming all the way down here to Oz. Here we are, not six weeks later, leaving that island having resigned from the job.  Unfortunately, the fact that Tangalooma is a private company will prevent us from detailing why it is that we left.  Upon accepting the job we signed a form stating we understood we were not to post anything about the company on the internet or social media outlets that is not information already available to the public. So, to our loyal readers, we will tell you that we were unhappy beyond our wildest dreams and in practicing what we preach we decided to stop complaining and take action to improve the quality of our life

The fun part is that we had no back-up plan.  The plan was to work and save and get out of Australia because of the very, very, very high cost of living. We hadn’t done enough research yet to take off traveling. And, hadn’t decided if finding a different job was what we wanted either.  In a small panic to figure out a temporary back-up plan we looked into house-sitting.  I’m sure many of you have heard of this idea of people looking for someone to look after their home and most often times their pets in their absence. There are several organized websites that connect house-sitters with homeowners and we joined two of them. House-sits can be anywhere from 3 days to 12 months, and the responsibilities could range from just sleeping in the home every night to caring for 5 dogs, 3 cats, 6 horses, 10 chickens, mowing the lawn, watering the plants and taking each animal for a 15 minute walk 3 times a day.  From what we understand it is often difficult for people to land their first house-sitting gig…though, we didn’t know that until we had already secured our first house-sit!  We were fortunate our reference from a previous experience helped us in this process!  We are very excited for this opportunity.

Our house sitting gig is here in Australia and we will be there for five weeks starting this month. What we are hoping is that this will literally buy us some time to figure out our next move without blowing all of our money on accommodations in the meantime. We will decide if we will try to find a new job in Oz or just go travel somewhere else. So far our experience in Australia has been awful.  We would like to give the country a fair chance to redeem itself after everything negative we experienced already. They do a lot of funny things here that are frustrating and because of our already frustrating situation on the island we feel like we have a much lower tolerance for these things. We are learning that Australia is very behind the rest of the developed world with their internet and wifi availability, that when you use your debit card it somehow takes money out of your savings account you were planning to gain interest on not out of your checking account, and whenever you use a credit/debit card of any kind you can expect a ”surcharge” of anywhere from 1% to 10% for not paying in cash.  Of course, these things are small…but when you are starving and miserable you’d like to catch a break somewhere.

The wonderfulness we have experienced here has been in our co-workers at Tangalooma.  We met some incredible, hardworking, kind, generous individuals from Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand. These people made our departure from the island very sad.  We made some friendships that we will never forget.  And, we hope to cross paths with many of these special people in the future.  We are now planning to make that possible by traveling to Korea later this year even!

Yuna and Minjeong!!! Two of our very good friends! Look how big Brock looks in comparison to the girls!

Taiwan and Korea!! Miss you guys already! Thank you for everything!

Yes, Kathleen cried waving good-bye to everyone as the boat pulled away…

We will be spending our five weeks at the house sit to really develop this site and give ourselves to it 100%.  Our hope is to really inspire other to take action if they are unhappy with their current circumstances by sharing our journey. We look forward to hearing from many of you as we finally have the opportunity to embrace improving this blog and getting to know our readers!