Judie and I are in Australia, staying at a spectacular place overlooking Manly Beach. We’ve been here about a month and have another two weeks to go. Judie’s sister Kathy and her husband Jim were here with us for the first two weeks, which was a whirlwind of seeing the sights in Sydney. Much more on all of this later.

Things have calmed down quite bit with Kathy and Jim gone. I’ve been trying watercolors, without striking success, and I thought it might be fun to write some blog posts about this whole experience. I never turned off the NickinShoreditch site (and have been paying Word Press to keep it active for the past three or more years), so it seemed like a good idea to just add this all to the original collection of essays and photos. If I’d known that this site might have life beyond the two years in London, I suppose I might have named it something else.

Since I have already been here for a month, what will follow will not try to be chronological. Instead, I think it will end up being random stories, thoughts and photos. In the unlikely even that I produce a non-terrible watercolor, I’ll publish it, but don’t hold your breath on that.

How we ended up here for six weeks

Last fall, Judie and I were talking about going somewhere to escape at least some of the winter. Judie suggested that we could go to Miami and she could work out of the K&L Gates offices there. I had the idea of going to Sydney, where she could work out of the Sydney office. Judie liked the idea and had the idea of combining it with a speaking gig at Money 2020 Asia, a huge payments conference happening in Singapore at the end of March. She managed to convince her firm that this was a good idea, so here we are. Unfortunately, the conference was cancelled due to the coronavirus, but Judie’s work experience here has been very productive so far.

More to come.