questions answered

Firstly, thank-you for all your lovely comments, emails and messages after our big news. I felt so encouraged by every. single. one of them, like the blogging community just gave me a great big hug! And I felt reassured that we have not lost the plot entirely!  

I was inevitably flooded with questions, so I thought it would be just plain rude not to respond... :)

Where to now?

Those that know us personally would know that we have always toyed with the idea of heading north and jackarooing/jillarooing/governessing. Well this is exactly what we plan to do - we don't want to be sitting here in our rocking chairs resentful that we did not seize every opportunity in our youth, do all the things we wanted to do and experienced all we wanted to. Our plan is to travel and work around Australia for an indefinite amount of time - 6 months, a year, forever?! We really are not sure. We're happy to play it by ear and see what unfolds for us. We might find somewhere half way along our trip and stay there for five years! We might only last three months and want a roof over our heads again! Whatever happens I am open to it, which is great. It is freeing, and liberating and fine. My friend Amy is fantastically telling me: "Everything happens for a reason" - I'm throwing caution to the wind and putting my faith in this, my new mantra! I did this also when six months after moving to Yea Mr M lost his job and we were homeless, jobless, destitute! I (strangely) did not panic - I told him one door closed and another will open. I knew it. I prayed, as I often do, and then he was appointed manager of Ythanbrae. We found a new home we fell in love with. The same will happen this time, I know it. I'm praying, again.

This will essentially be our honeymoon - a great big adventure! Homeless and jobless but happy, that's our dream believe it or not.

When are you leaving?

Our first stop is to help friends in north west Victoria with their grain harvest. As my farming friends will know, harvest will be well underway at about the time of our wedding - which means that Mr M will be needed ASAP after our wedding. Yikes! Our plan is to try and be as organised as possible before the wedding and then Mr M to go start work the week following the wedding. Depending how organised we are I might join him straight away or I might stay here to pack up and organise our things into storage/sell my car/re-home our dogs etc.

Do we regret leaving Ythanbrae/coming to Brindabella? 

Not at all. We always said we came here with nothing to lose - we had in the back of our minds that it may not work, which it hasn't. Our time at Ythanbrae was brilliant, but it really had run it's course. We were going to do something else regardless of if we came to Brindabella or not. If we had done something else perhaps Brindabella would always be in the back of our mind, a niggling 'what if'. Now, we won't have that niggling - we have tried our hardest and it is not the right fit for us at this point. Like my bloganista-sister A Farmer's Wife told me - family farming situations are complicated. So complicated and complex and ever-changing and multi-dimensional...this is at the best of times, at the worst of times it can get hard. Succession planning in agriculture involves a lot of push/shove/things all lining up perfectly. I don't have to tell a lot of my readers that, who are in, or have been in, similar situations.

So you're walking away from all the work you've done on the ramshackle farmhouse?

Yes. This was what made the decision very hard. We have transformed the property in the 12 months we have been here, planting lots of trees which we got for our engagement, spending a lot of money on our house which at the end of the day we do not own and will be walking away from. This sucks. For those that don't know, we are holding our wedding right next door to our ramshackle farmhouse. Where we get married will essentially not be our home anymore. This also sucks. But it's ok also, our wedding will still be special. We did see this house as where we would have children, where we would raise a family. Getting our head around leaving that was hard - but now that we have decided to leave I have accepted that here is not the place we thought. I cried rivers of tears when we left the cottage, driving out the long winding driveway of Ythanbrae for the last time. I won't do that here at Brindabella. It's just not the same. It's not home. I have no idea where 'home' is but I know it's not going to come and find us, we have to go and find it, chase it, creat it and hold onto it.

Are you going to keep blogging?

I really hope so. This June marked my two year anniversary of a blogger in some capacity - either as Little Miss Emma or Cinderella at Brindabella. As with everything, we really don't know what our future holds at the moment, but the good parts about the present include blogging and we are hoping to take the good parts forward. Cinderella at Brindabella will cease to exist really...but something new might be born from it. Stay tuned.

But you're coming back right?

No. Another reason it was a very hard decision to make. We do feel that perhaps we came here ten years too early, so who knows - we may be back? But we made the decision to go in the mindset that we will not return. And we had to be comfortable with that, which was what we were finding the most hard., me in particular as I am essentially walking away from my family farm, where I grew up, where my Dad grew up, where my grandfather settled and raised his family and died mustering stock. It's hard. What we are doing is saying no to dinner on a Friday night with friends we grew up with, no to having parents nearby to mind (eventual) children. We might regret that! When we go this will no longer be our house - it will become somebody else's. We will essentially be homeless! Scary, yes. But we're taking comfort in the idea of seeking out our own path, our own dream, forging our own story and creating something else for ourselves.

So basically it's head down bum up! Now not only do I have to organise the wedding and all the crazy plans I have for that, we have to pack up our entire lives into storage, try and fit out our camper to live in properly for a year and still work our 40-50 hour a week jobs! No doubt there will be many, many, more posts updating you of our plans and our impending adventure.

Let the craziness begin...

Images by the ever fabulous birthday girl Lou from sunny + scout