The Adventure Begins: Needless to say, it has been a crazy month or so and not for the usual reasons of COVID and crazy politics. It has been crazy because after much thought and cogitation, Susanne and I decided to go ahead and sell our house in Flagstaff and start the next great adventure in our life.
We applied to immigrate to New Zealand way back in 2020, but that process is, shall we say, SLOOOOOOOOW. We had hoped that we would be there by now, but that just hasn’t happened. Dang. So we decided to just go ahead and start our adventure a bit early. It is an intimidating prospect to be homeless, but we have our trusty trailer to tour around in for awhile.
Although we loved Flagstaff, we thought about the long-term future and where we would want to be in the long-term in the event New Zealand did not work out for us liked we hoped. Once thing about Arizona is that it is heavily armed. I mean really heavily armed and that is just not a world that either of us really enjoy living in. If we had to live in the US we were going to located some place that was little less enamored with weaponry.
We put the house on the market and it was under contract in 1 day! Wowzaa. That did not give us much time to contemplate the plan for the future. It just required us to get busy and start packing up our stuff. We had to develop a scenario-based packing scheme: (a) blue dots for stuff we would take to New Zealand, (b) red dots for stuff we would keep in the event we didn’t go to New Zealand but stayed in the states or Canada and (c) other stuff we might need over the next 3 months. Let the packing begin.
Even though we had been cutting down our “stuff” over the last 5 years, it was scary to see just how much stuff we still had. And a lot of it was generally useless. We got to really see the “Costco Effect” in all of its ugliness. More shampoo than any human could possibly use. And cleaning supplies. Things in the pantry that stated “Best used before 2011.” You get the drift. Thankfully the homeless shelter in Flagstaff took donations so we took over all the food, cleaning, and sleeping supplies and gave it to them. They were very happy.
We had a trip planned to Colorado to visit some friends and really didn’t want to cancel, so we busted our butts for a week packing boxes and moving them out to the storage unit. It was exhausting, but we got a lot of the stuff boxed up and we felt pretty good about our trip.
Part of the plan in Colorado was to go and visit some new friends we had met, Geoff and Caroline, who live in Ft. Collins but also have a house in Mexico. They needed some one to look after the house in the winter and we had suggested we might be able to do that for them.
We spent almost two weeks in Colorado enjoying the beauty and hanging out with friends that we hadn’t seen in a long time. We spent a night with Geoff and Caroline and had a great time and we committed to 3 months of house sitting from December to the end of February. Possibly longer if New Zealand hadn’t come through or we just felt like hanging there longer.
We drove back to Flagstaff thinking that we didn’t have that much more stuff to pack. The first morning back, both Susanne and I were wandering around the house in horror at how much stuff we still had to do. Finally, we both found our bearing and started packing again. Ugh. One of our goals going forward in life is to start to simplify and all the packing has reaffirmed the decision to do that.
The movers came on the 9th and loaded up all the furniture and heavy stuff and moved it to a storage unit. We decided to rent a little Airbnb to stay in until we closed and allow us to finish up whatever we needed to do in Flag.
After everything was in the storage unit, the realization of how exhausted I was really set in. We headed to the Airbnb and just hung out. It was a nice place except for the security cameras that blasted a 50,000 lumen light right into our place. It was annoying. We ended up putting duct tape over them and all was right.
Probably the one being that suffered the most through this whole process was Sadie. Between the packing, meeting all sorts of strange dogs, and new environments, she was totally worn out. I felt bad that we had put her through so much, but at least she was going to get to be with us 24/7 for the foreseeable future.
We sat on the porch enjoying and glass of wine and marveling at what we had just done. Let the Grand Adventure begin!
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