After leaving Chamonix we headed back to Australia to a little bit of a situation with our house. Our tenant had unfortunately died and left the house in a state and we had a lot of work to do to get it back up to liveable. Its always hard renting out your own house and if we wanted to keep living our nomadic lifestyle we came to the realisation that a house with a huge rainforest/garden was not the best property to rent out so decided to sell.
We spent the next few months working on making it sparkle and lucky for us the property market in Queensland was red hot. So within a week of it being on the market we had an offer. That was great except for the fact that we didn’t have a place to move into. So quickly went on the hunt for a little apartment in Brisbane city which would mean we had a place to store our possessions and could just shut the door and leave when we went on our next adventure.
After a few weeks of searching we found a little place in the centre and so spent the next few months having an awesome time exploring Brisbane. After living on the Sunshine Coast for so long and a little away from everything we were both like kids in a candy store living in the city. Things like a weekly shop pretty much turned into us deciding what we wanted just before we cooked it and wandering down to the store 5 mins walk away to get the ingredients. Or if we were really lazy taking our pick of the hundreds of restaurants walking distance from our apartment or if we were really, really lazy getting Uber Eats delivered which we couldn’t do on the Sunshine Coast as we lived too far out of town. My personal favourite was the reduced time it took to clean a little apartment in comparison to a house.
Time flew by and Chamonix was soon calling again so we headed back to France. We loved it so much the first season we were a little nervous it wasn’t going to grab us as strongly the second, especially considering Tim and I have a habit of getting bored with the same thing pretty quickly. But within weeks we knew this was the place for us and our dream of living in both the northern and southern hemisphere was potentially being realised. Outside of snowboarding up a storm and eating all the cheese and drinking all the wine we started considering our long term options. Finding a rental property in Chamonix is hard. Finding one that is a reasonable price for the season is even harder. So we crunched the numbers and worked out it was probably better to purchase our own place than rent and went about finding one.
Weeks went by and we were not really enamoured with anything until we happened upon a little real estate agent we hadn’t seen before tucked away in a corner of a square near our favourite restaurant. Fate! Needless to say the rest is history and we are now the proud owners of a little apartment in Les Bossons just outside of Chamonix centre. I could potentially swing a cat in it if said cat didn’t have a long tail. If I ever imagined a building I wanted to live in France in it definitely had window shutters, flower boxes and granite window frames and our place has all of these. We also have amazing French neighbours and it very much feels like a little community.
So our dream of living 6 months in Europe and 6 months in Australia is now very much a reality. Or as we like to say the never summer club. We are just lucky that winter in Queensland is like everyone else’s summer. S