Arriving in a new land.

Even though the data will tell you that Australia is surprisingly "same" across the whole island, I don't think when you first move you can take much comfort in that. Things just feel weird. Luckily we were so excited about our new life that we embraced all the new experiences, and things that later came to annoy us we found amusing and charming. I think that's what is known as The Honeymoon Period.

I clearly remember driving home from school one afternoon and proclaiming to the kids "I can't believe how lucky we are to live here!". It was the damn trees, the local scenery and the gum trees just turn my brain into that emoji with the hearts for eyes. The drive to school was longer but I just loved these drives through country roads each day. I travelled with a camera all the time and would stop often to capture these moments.

These experiences couldn't have been any more opposite to the inner city life we had just left, and we felt very much like foreigners in a new land. I'm afraid I can't say that South Australians are welcoming types, they are certainly very, very nice people but when it comes to embracing new people to their land, they really don't have a lot of experience with it. As part of our move I had created a new phrase "team Vann" to let my girls know where we all in this together and for those first few months we had the comfort of having each other as something that felt like home.

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