We are Out-a Here!

Finally. As I sit here on a 10 hour flight to London, I can’t help but marvel at the massive amount of stuff that we either own, rent, use, or otherwise have built up over the course of the years. It has taken the better part of a month to just pack / toss / deal with our possessions that are not coming with us on this trip. It’s not just the house either, though that has been an incredibly time consuming endeavor. It’s all the other stuff that one spends money on. The vehicles, insurance, taxes, gardeners, memberships, mailing addresses, phone bills, cable, internet, utilities, health insurance, etc… Just canceling and suspending accounts has been much more stressful than I have anticipated. I wish I had given myself more time to wrap these things up: I think I had about one night to actually pack for this trip. At least we are finally done with it all, and if we forgot anything, too late to fret over it.

  We don’t quite have any renters lined up for our house, but a few people have shown some interest. I’m not too worried (yet) about getting some offsetting income as Cindy (our real estate management contact) seems to know what she’s doing and is taking care of everything. We’ll keep our fingers crossed in the meantime. We managed to fit all of our stuff in storage, though I’m not sure how we could have fit the cars in there as originally planned: the space is packed pretty tight!

 

Here it is before storage:

Here it is after we loaded it up:

Man, that’s a lot of stuff. Part of me wishes that we had not bothered and just gotten rid of everything on craigslist. In the end, we ended up packing only a backpack and a roller bag (30 lbs) each. It still feels like too much stuff to bring, but we couldn’t see ourselves going the other route (backpacker) and only bringing one pair of underwear or something. Yikes.

I wish I could show the remarkable feat of organization that Ana created with her pre-departure checklist. Two pages, multi-columned, covering any and all things that needed addressing before we left: everything from the house, to business accounts, to hotel bookings, to setting up emergency contact networks so that our family members would not worry so much. Amazing that we were able to check everything off before we left… and that was before we found termites had eaten away some of our hardwood flooring!

A special thanks to Keith and Jules for letting us crash at their house before we left: Thanks guys! Our first stop is Madrid, with extended touring in Andalusia. Looking forward to it… Vamanos!

Tags: Packing,Departure