0703112230 Where are my keys?

We have decided to go to Hong Kong five days earlier. The school at which my dear wife will teach has given us three days in a Hong Kong hotel – we will pay for another couple of days. The practical side of this means that we can all go together as a family on the first trip. My eldest son has to finish year 12 in Australia in November. We are going to arrange for him to finish the last week of the term four days early and then be with us for the two week break in August. He then has to return to Australia to complete the last term of high school while staying with a family from church. He will have a car – our 2002 AU III falcon – as a “P plate” driver.
This may be a challenge for him. He will be trusted to stay with a family church with his own car, drive himself to school and other commitments while studying to successfully complete his year 12 certificate.
We have yet to ask a family at church if he can stay with them. It is on our “to-do” list. It is not a subject that we can bring up easily. We thought it might be easier if we put an add in the ward newsletter –“ Free to good home – one cat and one boy. Cat has own food, boy has own car.”

For our move to Hong Kong we will have to pack as if we are going on a week long holiday and then pack up the house as if we are moving. Seeing as we are selling all our worldly possession, we roughly estimate that 12 packing boxes would be economical. The kids get one box.

In any other normal move, the kind where we have simply shifted to another city or in some cases a few kilometres within the same town, I simply loaded the car with boxes of stuff and ferried them to the new place until it was done. There would always be a strange box of stuff that missed out on being packed – it might be the cleaning chemicals under the laundry sink, or the contents of the dryer or even a box of books and papers in the garage – this time there can be no other stuff. We pack for a holiday, then pack for moving, then clean the house for settlement and go to the airport. This move raises some interesting administration questions: Do I take the mop and bucket to the airport? What will I do with the vacuum cleaner? I have thought about hiring a mini-skip and leaving it in the driveway for the last big cleanup into which I will dump all the stuff that is no longer economical to maintain.

We have decided that nothing in the kitchen is worth taking. Every appliance will be cheaper to replace than it would cost to send over. Most of it was made within site of Hong Kong in China. There will be no box of groceries, no esky with the frozen food, no box of half used condiments and no box of heavy box of pots and pans. All will be replaced on arrival. Everything.

When we are at the airport waiting for the plane, we will have no keys. No keys for the little car, no keys for the big car, no house keys for the upstairs doors, no keys for the downstairs, no chapel key, no keys for the rental property and, for me particularly, no keys for my motorbike. None.
We will have everything we own in our suitcases, a few boxes of personal possessions on their way via courier and the largest number we have ever had in the credit column on our bank statement.