We got our Visa grant letter !

Dear Mr xxxx,
I am pleased to advise that your application for a Class VE, subclass 175 Skilled - Independent
visa was approved on xxxxxx April 2009 and visas granted to the following applicants:

WOW !.. Couldn't believe it when the mail came in. The complete letter is quite big and although the title said "grant" I made sure to read the whole letter before I told Kim. Tears of happiness !
So this is really it : We're now Australian permanent residents ! We can finally start moving forwards again ! Our lives have been on hold ( well... we both got loads of certificates in the meantime ) for about a year now. We don't see it as a lost year but it certainly feels good to be able to plan ahead again. We stopped buying clothes, stopped subscriptions etc because we would end up having to throw them out when we would go to Australia.

One-way ticket to Brisbane ?... or Perth ?... Sydney perhaps ?... We're not sure yet, but our visa allows us to settle wherever we want ! One thing is for sure : We want a change, we want nice weather : No more clouds. We will visit some towns when we arrive in Australia and make our decision where to settle on our gut feelings. My gut feeling (and my research) says we'll end up either in Perth or in Brisbane, but I have been wrong before. For all we know we might end up in Cairns / Darwin or Sydney !

I found a nifty little device called a Campbell-Stokes recorder. On this page you can find a LOT of information about Australian weather. It even includes 'sunshine maps' ! Ofcourse the yearly average is pretty useless, but the monthly averages are helpful. You can see that Brisbane has a lot of sun all over, and Perth has a lot of sun too but maybe a little bit too much in January / February. It seems that Brisbane is more 'temperately warm all over'. You guessed it : I did a lot of research , and Brisbane is my #1 , Perth my #2. For work conditions we would be better off in Melbourne / Sydney but we pretty much concluded that if we move , we really want a change : This includes climate. If we move to Melbourne we might as well stay in Europe.

But like I said before nothing has been decided and the decision is not only mine to make, and perhaps when we get physically there we might hate the place ( this happened to us before when we visited San Diego ).