Adventure starts with running away from home

Or with getting rid of a lot of junk stuff. At least our adventure does. And when you are married to someone who is great at holding on to junk things because you never know when it might come in handy, well, this process is just a freaking treat. This is when my training of watching many hours of shows on HGTV that entailed some form of purging came in handy.

Things get divided into 5 categories: save in storage, take with, sell, donate, trash. You have to go room by room, even if your house is less than 1000 square feet and has two small storage sheds, you'd be amazed by what pack-rats can stuff inside and want to hold onto. Because then you have to have a whole process of: Really? Do you really want to pay someone to move this for you all the way to another country? OR Do you really want to pay a storage facility to keep these unopened bottles of motor oil for a year or more? Yeah... this process is super fun (NOT).

Then, you hold a couple of yard sales because you live in Colorado and the weather cooperates Friday but not Saturday and then again just for the morning of Sunday, so you still have a bunch of stuff to get rid of and you really want to try and make a buck off of it so you put it all in the carport and then pull it all back out the following Thursday to see who you can sucker into buying this stuff that you no longer want/need/have room for. This was my first experience with a yard sale seeing as how in Costa Rica, yard sales are not a thing in any way, shape or form. They were fun and boring. It was weird to have people come into our yard and peruse our stuff. It was weirder still when a part of me that I never knew existed was actively trying to hawk our things. We made some money and got rid of lots of stuff. Our kiddo, who is 4, had somewhat of a hard time with mom "selling all of her toys" (which of course as with all 4 year olds, that's an exaggeration because we put plenty in storage and brought one and a half suitcases FULL of toys and books) and still brings this up 6 months later. She was also personally affronted when someone would come into the yard, perused and left without buying something. There were a lot of questions, asked multiple times: Why are we selling our stuff? Why doesn't that guy want to buy anything? What are we doing with the money we get? Can you buy me more toys with the money we get? And these are only the questions the 4 year old asks.

While all of this is going on (you know, the packing, putting in storage and getting rid of all the items that fill your home), you also should be taking care of ALL the other details. And you do, except well, some... well, some you just leave hanging in the wind until you can muster the strength and energy to deal with them.

This means details like: What are we doing with the cars? What about the dog and the cat? How do we get our stuff over to wherever we are going? How do we apply for a visa and where do we do this? And... you might have the propensity to have a panic attack or spring some new gray hairs every time your anxiety kicks in (I wouldn't know, anxiety doesn't tend to affect me, HAHAHAHA!!!!), but don't. Once you put the wheels in motion, things start falling into place, as if by magic. We had a lease, our broker called and asked if we were ready to trade it in after two years (so, a year early than what we leased it for), we said yes and it all worked out nicely and inexpensively.

As for the other car? Well, we owned that one outright and since my spouse had a car accident and totaled it 5 weeks before we were moving, well, that took care of that vehicle - yeah, I can tease and laugh about the accident now because he's okay and recovering but it wasn't that way for a few weeks. And let's just say that in this case, that isn't my idea of things working out nicely nor inexpensively... but I keep telling myself there must be a reason why this happened and that although I'm not understanding it at the moment, I hope to look back soon-ish and be able to see it.

The dog.... she's 11 and deaf. She's a ball of anxiety of her best days. Putting her on a plane to fly in cargo for many hours didn't sound like the best of ideas to us. My father-in-law graciously accepted to add her to his pack (he had two dogs already) and she seems to fit right in and be happy with them. He even rigged her up with a cow bell so that he can find her, since she can't hear him and respond when she's called. We do miss her dearly, though.

The cat has been through hell and back. She's a survivor. She came into our home when our child was a little over 2 years old and has put up with everything a toddler can put her through. Multiple lotion baths, carrying her here, there and everywhere, getting a door slammed on her tail and nearly severing it, and finally last December she survived a month out in the rocky mountain wilderness during a very snowy and cold time. This was courtesy of our pet-sitter who didn't heed our instruction that the cat is a daredevil who tries to escape out the door every chance she gets. When we came back from visiting our family in Costa Rica, the pet-sitter told us he was 100% sure she was dead, either because something ate her or because, you know, winter. She wasn't. I was ecstatic when we got the news. Of course we couldn't leave her behind! She's young enough and seems to have gotten over her PTSD from last December so I wasn't worried about having her travel for 22 hours and move to a new environment.

Taking a pet with you somewhere isn't necessarily easy though. First you need to figure out how your pet will travel. Some cargo company that specializes in this or a commercial airline? We traveled with Icelandair. They allow pets as cargo. We had to call them, tell them how much she weighed and the measurements of the travel container she would be in. They charged us $147 for her airfare.

Depending on the country you are traveling to, you need to meet certain requirements. We got lucky that Spain isn't very complicated (they just want health certificates for the animal) and they don't do a quarantine, although Iceland quarantines so we weren't allowed to see her during our layover. Our vet works with the USDA to give her an updated exam that had to be completed no more than 20 days before our flight and they filled out all of the necessary paperwork. Then the USDA vet has to sign the paperwork that your vet has completed and your pet is good to go. All of this paperwork varies in cost but you can plan on spending about $100 to $150 on this piece. More if your pet doesn't already have some things taken care of like an updated rabies vaccine and a universal microchip (both of which she had).

Finally, at the airport, she gets checked in at the check-in counter, but then the pet's carrier gets scanned in a special area of the airport (which is not right next to the check-in counters but a little walk away) and after that she is finally checked in and you don't see her again until your destination, where she arrives at looks at you like What. The. Hell. Feed her some wet food and hopefully she'll forget all about her recent ordeal.

The whole visa thing... that's for another post!

Throughout my research, I kept finding nomadic people giving advice saying you should always have a handful of things that make any place feel like your home. A blanket, a picture in a special picture frame, some book ends or a tchotchke that you've had forever. We brought a blanket with us that Sean and I have had since we met back in 1996. I went to a print shop nearby and printed a bunch of pictures right away at put them all over the place, and while we didn't bring any tchotchkes our kid's toys and books strewn all over the place give the place that homey feel. But what makes our new place feel mostly like home? Our cat. Because "What greater gift than the love of cat?" - Charles Dickens