Making the Most of a New City

When it's time to move to a new city, there's a few things I do to get ready:

(1) Find out where we'll be living and spend a few minutes a couple of times a day in the week(s) leading up to the move scanning Google maps to get a feel for where we'll be in relation to shopping, parks, the Big Top,  and tourist attractions (aka Places to People Watch).  

In getting ready for Brisbane, I had weeks to do this.  I had located our apartment on the map, searched for playgrounds, and located the Target and the Coles (Cirque's suggestion for grocery shopping).  We were going to be close to everything, so I was pretty happy about that.  I was especially excited about being three blocks from the City Botanical Gardens.

The map below shows our apartment (the yellow flag) and surrounding areas.  Green flags are places we've been, green flags with dots are places we've been many times and I had some idea we'd be going to before even arriving in the city.

View Australia Tour in a larger map

(2)  Search Facebook and the Web in general for Mommy groups or other family-centric social networks and ideas for family-friendly and free things to do nearby.  Contact people who may know people who can get me in touch with mommies.

For Brisbane, I found Brisbane Kids and their Facebook page weeks before getting here, then was directed to their sister site, Brisbane Baby, and also Bottle Babies, when I was trying to find the most US-like formula for Kaylee after getting here and finding that she was not happy with the formula.  Though these were more informative, "here are the events going on this week in your neighborhood," type pages, not the same mommy group type community that I found in LA, they were very helpful.

(3) Search "family-friendly things to do in..." or "must see in..." in Google to get an idea of the places we might go while we're living somewhere.  To live in a city for a few months and not have hit the top ten tourist places would be just silly.

Here's a few for Brisbane:
5 favourite things to do with kids in Brisbane
Trip Advisor: Top 10 Things to Do in Brisbane

So I made my list of things I really wanted to do:

• Walk/Play on South Bank
• Visit Queensland Museum
• See the view from the top of Mt Coot-tha
• Hold a koala
• Go to parks

And since we'll be back in Brisbane for a day during our December cruise, I knew that some of the things might happen more than once (holding a koala) and some might be better saved for summer (the beach).

(4) Get as much information as I can out of Dylan and the Cirque-provided City Guide to know what they suggest for shopping, doctors, places to visit, how to get to the Big Top, etc.

(5) Expect to have anything resembling a plan go flying out the window immediately upon arriving in that city.

Here, the biggest adjustment from what I had learned in my pre-arrival planning was the grocery shopping.  Cole's turned out to be not the best place for groceries (for example, this particular Cole's doesn't carry any baby food), though they do make awesome shortbread cookies.

In three weeks, we move on to Sydney.  I've already started working on my mental map of the area where we'll be living.  Probably time to start working on finding some mommy groups.