Oh, the places you’ll go….

So it is 2012 and we decide that our little Clarkterstraat clan was going to start an adventure. Off to The Netherlands for 2 years and then back to the big smoke of Sydney. 

Add an extra two children, many trips to different parts of the world and then 2020 brings it all to a grinding halt via the pandemic. No school, barely a trip to the supermarket let alone jetting across to another destination or exploration while driving cross continent. So we just dealt with it. We have sat tight and been really enjoying our own little piece of paradise. School from home, work from home and once things loosened up a little a walk around the compound, a beach swim most days and life was just a little bit slower. 

So now around 130 days and 10 hours since schooling started from home, this little desert adventure is coming to an end. We aren’t choosing to travel around the world during a pandemic. The work contract has ended and we simply need to move on. We want to head back to our adopted home in The Netherlands but there is no simple route there at the moment. We could go back to Australia but the possibility of being locked in with a perfectly good home on the other side of the world is less than ideal. 

So long story short. After many emails and calls with officials on both sides of the world, the one thing for sure is that we will be saying goodbye to Abu Dhabi very soon. We may head north or we may head south. Time and global circumstance will dictate a lot of what the short term holds for us.

But what an adventure. What a time in the world. What a nice thing to be heading ‘home’. Even if the journey to home is a long one.