A (dead) lemon tree of our own

I know from the subscription and visitor numbers that only a fraction of regular currybetdotnet readers also read my other blog - 'A lemon tree of our own' which my wife and I co-wrote about setting up home in Chania, Crete.

I thought, therefore, it was worth cross-posting and clarifying that we have now permanently moved back to the UK from Greece.

Why move back? Well, I was spending increasing amounts of time away from Crete in order to work in London, and there is a limit to how much time you can spend sleeping on friend's sofas for a few weeks whilst holding down contracts that entail full-time office work and stay sane.

It has also been a couple of years since my wife worked regularly, and she is looking forward to getting her career kick-started again, after spending two-and-a-half lovely years in the sun by the beach.

We've had a brilliant time over there. We went traveling with a plan and enough money to last three months, and we've managed to stay away for three years, visiting Spain, Qatar, Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy, Kefalonia, Austria, Macau, Miami, Dortmund, Barcelona and Amsterdam along the way.

Our lemon tree blog has served its purpose, and so we won't be posting there anymore. For now we'll be keeping the content up on Typepad, and indeed you can still find our previous travelogue on Yahoo! 360°. At some point in the future, when I've got a rainy Sunday afternoon to fill, I intend to use them as a practice migration project and an excuse to get Wordpress up and running on my server to have a play around with. It will break a lot of inbound links, but at least I'll have the archive of content fully under my own control.

And the lemon tree itself?

Well, we were unsure whether to try to give it away to someone, or if we should ask any of our neighbours if they wanted to plant it in their gardens, or whether to just leave it for the next owners of our house. In the end it made the decision for us.

Despite surviving several times when we were away from Crete, during our last trip the UK, it died. It seemed a rather fitting comment on the end to our overseas adventures.

For now.