Ah, just a few more days. Yes the house sold and closes in 4 days. It was a long process but we received everything we wanted with no requests to make any changes. Inspection and Appraisal was a breeze. This process to move has been double difficult since it was not just packing everything up and transferring to somewhere else. One of the main efforts was going through everything we have accumulated…everything…and purging things we will no longer need or want to take. After 18 years in the same house and 30 years of marriage plus kids there is a tendency to have ‘stuff’. On top of that our plans are to store what ever we keep for a couple year while we travel. Last thing you want to do is pay for storage ($$) for a bunch of stuff you won’t need anyway.

Actually the purge has been the hardest part. You go through everything and end up with two piles – ‘keep’ pile and ‘purge’ pile (in our case garage/moving sale). After the first selection you then go through the keep pile again and do the same thing. Finally you do it a third time with the hopes of really being down to nothing more than what you feel you can’t part with. I truly believe Denise has done a great job in doing this but I also truly believe that in the end, a number of years from now, when we finally go to use this stuff we will find that there is still a large amount of items we will again want to get rid of – can’t avoid it.

I am not a fan (yes I despise them) of garage/moving sales. So all three weekends of doing these were quite the chore for me. Denise is much more aligned with doing these and again did a great job preparing everything and orchestrating successful events. With everything that sold there was still about a dozen large boxes remaining. After the 3rd sale we loaded up all that was left and took the stuff to Goodwill. Well now we are down to packing, packing, and more packing. Since we had some time, at least we thought, we purchased used packing material on Craigslist which saved a small fortune, and began to pack. Wow, this is another extremely time consuming chore. We are down to the last couple days and are just about done. We are bringing in some outside help to pack the kitchen and help professionally load the truck. We started out with using a POD like storage/moving system. It is called Upack by ABF. Since we had no idea of how much space we really would need we cancelled the Upack and they are bringing out an empty truck. The way this works is we load the truck and where our stuff ends they provide secure temporary doors that seal our things off from anything else with locks only we have keys to. We only pay for the space we use. After they pick the truck up they can then back-haul other commercial material in the balance of the space and then deliver our trailer to Florida for us to unload into a permanent storage unit. So far it has worked out well except for all the work on our end. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel and in less than a week we will be heading south out of Seattle pointing toward San Diego and then Florida stopping along the way wherever our fancy steers us. After about 4-5 weeks in Florida we will ‘be leaving on a jet plane’ for Panama. First stop is the ‘Coronado Golf and Beach Resort’.

Last night we had a gathering at the Fairwood Country Club to say good-bye to friends. About 40 people came by and it was nice to have some cocktails and dinner with them. It is funny as about 1/2 think we are just crazy for what we are doing and the other 1/2 are excited and almost jealous of us. Each to their own I guess. They say don’t let others dampen your dreams.

btw – if you want to follow our adventures it would be a good idea to bookmark this site and feel free to comment if you have any words of wisdom but don’t feel that you need to just to do it :).

RB