How we came to live on D’Urville Island.

If you’ve read a bit about us you’ll have an inkling that we’re pretty migratory folk. Labelled ‘The Nomads’ by many a well-meaning friend, we’re no strangers to change. Our 15-year old (and eldest) recently counted 16 houses she’d live in since her birth! – Though in our defence, our trajectory in recent years has slowed.

For our latest stint, we found ourselves living in beautiful Oxford, a town that edges the foothills of the Southern Alps in the north-west of the Canterbury plains. It was another tight-knit homeschooling community, another place I could have settled down in for years (but ultimately didn’t!) But there was a catch. Our lifestyle was held up by Danny driving the length and breadth of NZ in our 23m truck and trailer. He was gone for most of the week, leaving me to hold the homeschooling fort together on my own. Some days it was a very precarious fort.

We had fun times, and—with tween and teen hormones thrown into the mix—some very interesting times, but ultimately I knew that change was looming yet again. The kids needed their dad, I needed my husband, and my husband needed to stop drinking endless cups of coffee just to get through his day—or night!

So, we hatched a fool-proof plan: Sell the truck, purge all our crap, get down to backpacks, and move to England—stopping off in Thailand for a month en route. Our eventual aim was to get to Devon where my mum was buying property, create a space close to her, live sustainably, grow some veggies, and allow the kids to get to know their English family. Simple!

Truck sold, check. Passports renewed, check. Danny’s UK visa applied and paid-a-small-fortune for, check. And then, Covid-19.

Lockdown coincided with Danny parking up his truck and handing over his keys, so for two blissful weeks we had all that consolidated family time we’d been craving—and then reality crept in. Neither of us were working (my part-time gig had understandably stalled) and England was chaos. Money was still going out with no money coming in, and our house was still filled with far more stuff than would fit into a backpack.

*Bike tricks and flowers characterized our lockdown.*

Nervously, trying to look at this as a grand opportunity, we made up with Facebook and put our feelers out, ‘does anyone know of any live-in working positions around NZ?’ Friends? People I barely know? Anyone? And that’s how it happened. A gift from the universe dropped into my messenger inbox from a lady I had met only a few months ago at homeshooling camp: ‘why don’t you come and live on D’Urville Island?’

(Sidenote: Our lovely friend later admitted that she was half-pie joking!)

Well, we thought, why not?

Frankly, there were probably loads of reasons why not—not least of which was the partially finished UK visa application that we’d already paid for—but the pull of adventure and the feeling of rightness spurred us on. Pretty quickly we’d found a spare Island house to live in, thankfully furnished, along with the potential for farm work, and click, click, click, everything else more-or-less fell into place.

We gave notice on our Oxford rental and within three weeks we’d:

Bought a tandem trailer, taken a first load up to the island (tools and motorbikes) and loaded up for a second.
Listed over 40 auctions on Trade Me and given the rest of our ‘treasures’ away—the dump shop was very fortunate.
Bought a full set of ‘Red Band’ gumboots and enough fleece to knit a raft and sail across to D’Urville.
Spent Libya’s deficit on a ute load of food to last us as long as possible—ain’t no shops where we’re goin!