And Our Next Destination Is…

Sometimes, life moves at an astonishing speed. This is never truer than it is when I come back to the US, and this time around I’ve learned it all over again.

What? Didn’t realize I was in the US? I know. I’m waaaay behind on the real-time blogging.

I kind of thought that these three months in Indy would be relaxing; a chance to catch up with my family, friends, food, and culture that I’ve been craving for so long. And it was those things, but it felt like I’ve only dabbled in each of them. I’ve seen most of my friends only twice, spent nearly a month traveling outside of Indy (Chicago, D.C., Philly, NYC, St. Augustine), and all of a sudden it’s almost time to go.

Where are we going? I’ll get to that in a minute.

I’ve definitely been eating too much food and drinking too much craft beer (discovering a new favorite in Boulevard’s 80 Acre Hoppy Wheat), but I’ve tried to counterbalance that by embarking on the Insanity workout. Which, by the way, is really hard and reminds me daily that I’m not in my 20s anymore.

This is how that’s been going:

We also got massages, a Christmas gift from my parents.

Here’s how that went:

I’ve found myself with a steady stream of freelance work, something I look forward to continuing as we head to our next destination. I’ll also be turning my attention back to the mythical memoir, the one that keeps morphing in my mind but never appearing on paper.

Jared and I had hoped to submit my de facto partner visa application by the end of January. We dove into the paperwork, which, to my dismay, required me to list every country I’d visited over the last ten years, including dates. I huddled down with my passport, old emails and ticket stubs, and figured it all out. We were getting close – or so we thought.

After a few lengthy phone calls to the Australian Embassy in Washington, D.C., we took a bit of a blow. They ‘strongly recommend’ that applicants within the US submit a full application. That is, including all health and police checks. If we submitted the application without the checks, we wouldn’t be prioritized.

Obviously, I want to be prioritized. So we began the complicated, hoop-jumping process of applying for criminal record checks from the FBI, state of Indiana, UK, and Australia – any country that I’ve lived in for a total of 12 months during the past 10 years. Fortunately, I’ve already got one from Korea, though it needs to be translated.

All of this meant that we definitely weren’t going to get that application done when we wanted to. We talked about flying to New Zealand, where Jared could work and I could freelance while on a tourist visa. We discussed Canada. France.

But in the end, it hit us – why don’t we just go straight to Australia?

On March 7th, we’ll fly to LA to stay with my sister for a few days. On March 10th, we fly to Sydney.

Jared can work. I can stay for 90 days and will continue my online work. We can keep pulling together our paperwork and then submit a full visa application when we’re ready.

The answer, it seems, was staring us in the face the whole time. It just took a little while to see it.

I still want to write about the east coast of the US, and one of my favorite places of all time, St. Augustine, Florida. But first I wanted to get back to real time. To another Lateral Movement – swinging back to Australia – but one that finally feels like an upward movement as well.