My wife and I first settled in Cosheston after immigrating from South Africa December 1999 . Like many people that arrive from a different country we were almost penniless but after staying with my father for a few months managed to put a deposit down on a small bungalow in the village just before the house prices went up.
Being a nurse work wasn't much of a problem to find and I started at Withybush. Much of my free time was taken up with spear fishing off Barafundle and other beaches with cliff walls , the rest was taken up with the TA.
Although we had sufficient to get by on it often grated me that we were having to start again after spending so many years of paying off a property three times the size the one we had now .
I did a tour of duty in Bosnia with the army , when I got back my wife and I started to talk about what to do .Army pay had cleared all our out standing debts and the capital in the house had shot up but it was no use to us unless we went somewhere that housing was cheaper.
We did a lot of research and went to several expos and eventually settled on the South Island New Zealand .
I will not bore you with all the details of immigration but I arranged a job to go to in an area that suited all or needs. TIMARU it's about a hundred miles south of Christchurch.
I am blessed with a wife that does not complain much and with everything that went on just settled down to sorting things . There was one thing she did put her foot down about . I had just declared that the dog would be coming with us and the response was that if the dog was coming so were the cats ! Well that was that no point trying to talk her out of it. But the the biggest star of the show was Thomas age seven . He just wanted to know if New Zealand was more distant than Cornwall (the longest trip he could remember taking).
We left the UK six years to the day we had arrived there.

Well that blog sort of discribes me and my connection to Pembrokeshire .I will write more in a day or two about my first impressions of NZ and our life here.
MARK PAGE .