Myself and my kids left the UK to start our new lives in South Africa. My husband stayed behind to finish off his job and get the contents of our house and car shipped out. It feels like just yesterday we left but on the other hand, a life time ago.
I’m not going to lie, the first few months were extremely tough. Leaving the UK, the place our kids had been born and called home, their friends and school behind. Moving back to South Africa, to a town we had never heard of let alone dreamt of living in and the kids starting a new nursery school part time was a challenge for all of us. It took a few months before we settled into our new routine, made new friends and felt more comfortable in our new area.
The start of this year has been another huge adjustment, we moved into a new house on the school property that my husband is now Headmaster at, the beautiful school of Stanford Lake College. Our son started a new school in the closest town to us which is a 30 minute drive down the Mountain every day, so having to wake up alot earlier than we are used to in order to get him to school by 7am every morning has been…. interesting!
The reason we moved back was to be closer to family, we are still an 11 hour drive away from them but the difference is that we can drive that 11 hours instead of having to fly to them. We have seen our families alot more in the last year, been close by when our parents haven’t been well and needed us there, welcomed a new nephew into our family and seen everyone alot more in the last year than in past years. Another draw card was the weather and that hasn’t disappointed us at all. We have had lots of glorious days of sunshine that we have enjoyed immensely. Days spent by the lake, on the beach or just going for walks has been exactly what we dreamt of. And lastly, but by all means not least, has been the new addition to our family, Sheba, Craig and I both grew up with dogs and desperately wanted one for our kids but we didn’t feel it was fair to get one in the UK, so as soon as we were settled here we found our beautiful black labrador, she is amazing with the kids and has brought us so much joy.
As for my photography business, I never thought that after a year I would be as busy as I currently am, I decided to not market myself as I wanted to concentrate on settling my family into our new lives but word of mouth has spread and any business I get has been through that and with such wonderful people, it is great that I can fit my photography around my family and do something that I truly love doing.
Don’t get me wrong, life isn’t perfect here, we have power cuts daily, our internet is slow and we live in the middle of hectic road works so anytime we go anywhere it takes us an hour instead of 10 minutes, we miss our special friends we made in the UK terribly, but I can say without a doubt ,that moving back to South Africa has been the best decision we made and we love it here!
Obviously being a photographer I can’t post a blog post without photographs, so here they are, a year of photos from SA mostly taken on my point and shoot camera which is alway with me
and one taken from the helicopter showing off the beautiful part of the Country we live in!
Penny, lovely hearing of you progress and how much you love your new life! I wish you next year to be even better than the first! xx