My Timeline & Major Events

From Vegemite to Venti: From Sydney to Seattle: The Beginning of my Expat Life

TLDR: It’s Feb 2024 and I’m moving to the United States to become an Expat!

G’day from Seattle to all my mates back home in Australia. Today, I’m not just sharing a travel story, I’m living it. That’s right, I’ve officially taken the plunge and swapped Vegemite for Venti, crocs for gators, XL to XXXXL. As of 26 Feb 2024, Kelli and I have moved to Seattle, Washington to begin our expat lives.

Why?

So why the big move, you ask? The truth is, it wasn’t one specific reason, but a whole heap of them! A part of me has always craved new experiences, and let’s face it, Australia is fantastic, but there’s a whole other world out there to explore. It’s all largely linked to my other recent post Making the Most of Now.

This was actually one of my longest plans to come to fruition. I can still recall clearly when I was still working at Woolworths and went for a walk around the block with a mate/colleague and I realised that I wanted to try something, not just an industry, but a culture, a society and way of thinking. I wanted to be working somewhere ‘cool’. I wanted to see what it’s like working at a ‘hip’ place. I want to see what running and other adventures are out there.

How did I make it happen?

So from that day of roughly 2.5 years ago, I hatched a plan and started to make it happen. First, I had to figure out what I wanted and why; cool companies, trail running, big national parks and a way to make it happen fast. United States – boom. Yosemites, Google, Amazon, but making it happen fast wasn’t an option…. Long story short, working rights are tough to get, so I had to go the long way around and find a job at an Multinational company operating in Australia and pray that they give me an international transfer. I’m not really the religious type, so I found an opportunity at Amazon AU and made sure I performed and did what I could to get the transfer. Skip forward 2.5 years, to Feb 2024.

Moving to Seattle, WA, United States

Pros and Cons thus far

Sydney / Australia Pros

Seattle / United States Pros

Home of the NRL
Things Feel Cheaper: No Tipping and tax included in prices make buying things and eating out very simple.
Culture and Society feels more environmentally aware (although still have a long way to go)
Feels safer

There’s just more of everything. Food, people, portions and destinations to explore
People are very into everything: Sports, politics, pop-culture, you name it
There a way to make a lot of money over here, I just haven’t found it yet…

Adventure is Out There!

My ever-growing travel map of the US and beyond. Come say ‘Hi’!

My Life Throughout COVID

Life through COVID was a change – it presented me with opportunities and challenges. I’ve tried a new format of of showing my life throughout these times: Story Maps: https://storymap.knightlab.com/. See my test Story Map below:

One of the main things I wanted to get out of creating a blog was a way to autobiograph-ise my life. I like dates, timestamps and visuals – so I went in search of something of the Timeline variety to record, remember and relive my life. After all, my biggest fear is to look back on my life and regret not doing enough.

I stumbled upon an amazing, innovative site Knightlab which is all free to use their templates on Storytelling – Timelines and Storylines being my 2 favourites.

Hours upon hours of my time went into the creation of this:

Planning – design, template dates, highlights, databases, storage, naming conventions, etc
Scouring my Memories – Looking through photos (Google Photos is a great tool), memories, talking with friends for memories, old photo albums and others to pull out the moments in my life that I want to look back on and remember. Those critical moments where I achieved or learned something amazing. Or just something funny happened.
Putting it all together – writing the memoirs, making the short highlights videos, uploading everything, ensuring everything works and the main point, redoing it all every (year?) to keep it up to day.

Without further adieu, the Timeline of Ross Michell until the end of 2020 (as of time of writing).

Again, I would strongly recommend everyone to find your own way to record, remember and relive your own life. This last few weeks has been a saviour with COVID lockdowns coming back into Sydney, it has helped me reconnect with people and myself looking back on these memories and learnings.

“…After all, these are not the memoirs of an empress, nor of a queen. These are memoirs of another kind.” – Memoirs of a Geisha