The adventure begins at Swiss Cottage

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Heathrow marks the halfway point.

Garry and I finally reached the damp and chilly shores of England on December 13, 2005. More than two months earlier, we'd flown out of Sydney, Australia on October 8, ready to start a new life in London. I'm relocating with my company, while Garry has bravely agreed to come along for the adventure. Our arrival marked the end of an incredible 2.5-month sabbatical, travelling through New Zealand, North and South America, and the Middle East.

Our trip was made using a really handy OneWorld Global Explorer round-the-world ticket. We'll complete the journey in April when we plan to fly back to Sydney via Japan and Hong Kong. With luck, Japan will be in the midst of cherry blossom season, making for some truly postcard moments.

The first half of our sojourn took us to the USA, Canada, Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, and Jordan. So many sights, so many memories. After a while, it all became too much to absorb. I'm sure we'll spend months indexing more than 5000 photos captured on the road.

I've shared more about our adventures in the first couple of dozen posts of this blog. If you start from the post titled Two decades of American memories and read it to the end, you'll get the full story on our world tour so far. The photo below gives you a taste of the many sights we experienced. This image was shot in Toronto.

UPDATE: Follow this link for a full day-by-day overview of our extraordinary sabbatical experience, plus links to individual posts on our many adventures as we made our way to London.You can then catch up with the final leg of our RTW ticket as we made our way back to Australia via Japan by following this link.


Storage salvation courtesy of IKEA
I can't believe how time is flying by. It's hard to believe that we've already been in England for almost two months. I'm sure it was only a week since we were floating in the salty brine of the Dead Sea. Life has truly been a blur since we touched down at Heathrow. I've started work, we've opened UK bank accounts, and permanent living arrangements have rapidly fallen into place.

Last week Garry and I finally moved into a three-bedroom flat located in the leafy suburb of Swiss Cottage. This literally involved packing the contents of a 40-foot moving container into a small three-bedroom English flat. English homes really are smaller on average than most in Europe (or at least that's what the Economist magazine tells me).

Needless to say, additional storage was required. Thank goodness for IKEA. We've emptied our wallets into its hallowed Swedish halls, bringing home shelves, cupboards, sideboards and all manner of items. These now hide a lifetime of accumulated junk.

On the ground, elsewhere
If all of this wasn't enough to stress me out, I had to fly to New York the day after we moved house. I was asked at short notice to help our US leadership team with a series of planning workshops. In the meantime, Garry had transformed the flat into a real home. Everything finally seems to have its place and our Australian furnishings look like they were made for the flat. I arrived back in London last Saturday but then had to fly to Milan on Sunday to meet with my Italian team for the first time. I finally got back to London on Feb 1.

Since arriving, I've also made trips to our offices in Munich and Paris. Five countries in as many weeks - this must be Europe! I have no more business travel now until Feb 16. I'll be off to Madrid for the first time. Garry is coming with me. We'll be staying the weekend as a belated Valentine's Day treat.

Jude Law's kinda place
Our flat covers the top two floors of a lovely red-brick mansionette (think steps, lots of steps, to reach us from the ground floor - not so different from the image above taken in Amman, Jordan, in December). Swiss Cottage is relatively central, just north of Paddington Station (easy access to Heathrow for me thanks to the 15-minute Paddington Express), with good tube access to my office or the finance district for Garry. We have two movie theatres, three Live Theatres, and a gym within ten minutes' walk of the flat. There are also plenty of great restaurants and exotic shops in the immediate area, plus Primrose Hill and Regent's Park are only ten minutes' walk south. All in all, a great find in a great location.

I've been told Jude Law lives in the area. I've yet to see any sign of him, other than perhaps the turds his dog has left behind. Unlike Sydney, dog owners in London appear disinclined to clean up after their pets. Garry now spends his time feverishly scanning the pavement for wayward piles.

Exploring the neighbourhood
Aside from house hunting, we've also been busy catching up with UK friends and taking in plenty of live theatre. We've seen a witty comedy, a rock musical, and a traditional pantomime in our first month. As part of our RTW ticket, we fitted in a five-day trip to my brother's house in the Austrian Alps at Christmas.

I stuffed up my knee the day before we flew to Austria. As a result, I never got a chance to test my ski legs. Garry did get in one afternoon of skiing, and we all managed a session of night-time tobogganing on the last day in Austria. All in all, the time with family was heaps of fun for all and a wonderful white Christmas (we had two feet of snow on the ground).

Europa House

It’s come to my attention that I’ve never posted about the first two months we lived in London. We landed at Heathrow in December 2005. However, I didn’t start writing this blog until February the following year. As a result, our early days as expats were never captured here for posterity.  

The blog was inspired by Michael Williams, a friend who’d moved to London a few months earlier than Garry and I. Over coffee one day, I complained about the challenge of keeping everyone up to date with our antics. You’d write to someone one week, talk to someone else by phone a week later, email someone else the week after and so on. Before you knew it, you couldn’t recall who’d been told what about our unfolding adventure in London.

Mike explained that he’d solved the problem by creating this fancy new-fangled thing called a blog. Now anyone could visit his online updates and be brought up to speed at any time. I loved the idea, and hence this blog was born. However, its genesis came several months after we arrived in London leaving a gap in its historical record. This retrospective post, written in September 2026, attempts to rectify this unfortunate omission.

Garry and I flew in from Amman, Jordon shortly after 11:00am on Tuesday, 13 December 2005. My company had given me a relocation budget for the move. We used these funds to pack up our home and relocate ourselves across the globe. Some of it also paid for temporary accommodation until we found ourselves a permanent place to live.

Enda, an Irish friend in Sydney, who’d lived in London for many years, recommended the area around Little Venice as a potential home base. We followed his advice, and after a little internet sleuthing, I booked us into temporary accommodation at Europa House, an elegant Regency townhouse complex offering long-stay serviced apartments. It was less than ten minutes’ walk from the canals of Little Venice. From here you’d walk another ten minutes straight into Paddington Station.

We initially booked for ten nights, followed by a week away, and then a second month-long booking until late January. Months earlier we’d made plans to join my brother and his family in Austria for Christmas, our first-ever white Christmas. We flew to Munich on 23 December and returned to London on 28 December in time for our first New Year's Eve in the UK.

We booked a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. However, the folks at Europa House took us under their wing. Much to our surprise (and delight), they upgraded us into a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment, and not only that, they gave us the largest and most impressive of these apartments.  I've highlighted its location in the Google Street View image above.

The apartment featured a large living room that followed the building’s elegantly curving façade. The additional space made it feel more like a home and less like a hotel. The second bedroom conveniently served as a handy storage room for our travel luggage, and a growing collection of bits and pieces we began acquiring for our life in London. 

Months earlier, we’d packed the entire contents of our Sydney apartment into a 40-foot container, along with Garry’s Saab sedan. While we spent two months on sabbatical, our household effects quietly made their way to Europe. Hence, we only needed a place equipped well enough to get us through our first six or seven weeks before everything arrived. As an aside, the cleaner we eventually hired to look after us in Swiss Cottage was working part-time at Europa House.

Guests at Europa House had access to three acres of private gardens behind the building. Windows in our apartment's kitchen and second bedroom overlooked the grounds. However, in the midst of winter, it's fair to say we never really took advantage of them. Likewise, the Christmas period was a quiet time for Europa House. As a result, it kindly reserved the same apartment for our entire stay despite our week-long break in Austria. Even better, they told us to leave spare clothing and other loose ends in the apartment while we were away. 

While I worked and travelled for business, Garry got to work sorting out our new life. His first project was finding us a place to live. We initially focused on an area extending from Paddington and its surrounding area, arcing east towards suburbs north of Regents Park. As you know, he eventually stumbled across a freshly renovated three-bedroom apartment on Fellows Road in Swiss Cottage, and the rest is history.

Our month living at Europa House was the perfect introduction to life in London. So much of the city is noisy, a little grimy and often crowded. By contrast, Maida Vale and nearby Little Venice were a quiet, green and elegant oasis. Every morning I’d walk to Paddington Station via Warrington Crescent, a street that gently curved towards the canal, lined on both sides by immaculate white Victorian stucco terraces. It was like living in a Hollywood movie.

We also had all manner of quirky local highlights, including the canals, Abbey Road, where the Beatles once immortalised a humble pedestrian crossing, and the hustle and bustle of Paddington Station. Although I must admit it wasn't the cheapest neighbourhood to live in. On our first day in London, while waiting for our apartment to become available, Garry and I walked into Paddington for lunch at a local gourmet burger joint. We were stunned after paying more than AUD 20 each for a humble burger. It was also our first lesson in avoiding currency conversions while living in London. Everything was expensive when converted to Australian dollars.

Our nearest supermarket was a Sainsbury's on Kilburn High Road, about a mile from Europa House. We could walk there in about 20 minutes.  However, the return journey laden with groceries was a little too much to walk. As a result, we'd often catch the tube one stop from Kilburn High Road to Maida Vale, a block north of our serviced apartment.  Hauling groceries on the tube was an eye-opening introduction to life in London for residents without a car. I don't recall ever dragging the weekly shop home on public transport before then.

One final note. Sadly, we never took any photos of the apartment and its surroundings. As a result, I've taken to the internet to source the images published here.