#blogjune Post 14 - It's been 5 years

Tomorrow is Crazy Market Day in Bellingen.  This is when the monthly markets are on and all the shops in town offer some crazy deals.

I have been allocated a table up in the busy area of the main street to promote library services.  I will be focusing on our online services such as Zinio eMagazines, OneClickDigital eAudio Books, online databases and online computer learning.

While that is exciting, today (well it probably wasn't exactly on this date) marks 5 years since we visited Bellingen for the first time.

I had a telephone interview for my current position and they had invited me to Grafton to meet face to face.  So regardless of whether I got the job or not, I booked us in to the Bellingen Valley Lodge to stay one night - I had to work on the Sunday.

Surprisingly I got offered the job - I didn't accept straight away. So in a surreal haze we drove from Grafton to Bellingen thinking the whole time that this was going to be our new home.

We had never been to Bellingen before.  We had many long weekends at Iluka, we even had our honeymoon there and I had always thought it would be good to work in a library down this way.

Bellingen was like stepping into the twilight zone - well coming from Goodna in Ipswich Qld it was.

The street was alive that Friday night before Crazy Market Day.  It was green (a change from the brown we'd become used to in Qld due to a 10 year drought).  And there was a quirkiness to the town.

Now here we are.  I can't say that I feel like a local yet, but at the same time I think I may just be a little quirky too so perhaps I do fit in here.

We lived in Bellingen for a year before purchasing a house in Urunga next to the beach.  We found we spent more time at the beach and the houses were a little cheaper on the coast.

Thoughts of home (yes Ipswich will always be home) creep in every now and then and I have internal battles of whether we should all move back to Qld.  But when it's summer and the sun is shining off the water and the surf is pounding - I don't think I can leave!


Miss A and I on that weekend 5 years ago - our first taste of a Bellingen sunset at Bellingen Valley Lodge