Turning life upside down

I wanted to leave a blog post of apology and explanation. No, I did not give up on my blog. My life just seemed to get a bit crazy. We had always planned to move from our Southern California home after my husband retired but, we were not sure where that would be.

My husband and I decided to use our motorhome adventures to find our happy place. In the past three years we have traveled across the country three times. It turns out that our happy spot is clear across the country. For so many reasons, we love Western North Carolina.

This is when life really got nuts! How exactly do you leave everything you know and love? Family, friends, routines and your stuff? First step was preparing to sell our house by fixing any dings and boo-boos. Next step was to choose a realtor and put the house on the market. We had no idea when the house would sell but we thought it might go fast. Fast was an understatement! We had our first offer in four hours. Three days later the house was off the market with a 30 day escrow. We were naïve and thought 30 days would be no problem. Turns out that the buyer has 17 days to change their mind, secure their loan, inspections, etc. All of that time we could not do a thing because the sale could fall through and, we will be back to square one. Yay, the house sold. We now had less than two weeks to pack and move out.

Now, what to do with our stuff? Do we have a shipping company pack it all up, put it into storage and ship it to us when we find a place? That option was very expensive! So now we thought that we would radically down-size. However, to store and ship a small amount of our stuff was equally as expensive. So now it gets even crazier! We decided to pack up the motorhome with whatever we could and get rid of the rest. We divided our life in the three piles. What we could not live without, what we would get rid of, and what we would like to keep only if it fits.

We worked nonstop hours. My husband became a superhero, magician and wizard. He packed, did repairs, cleaned, shopped, canceled utilities, did last doctor appointments, shredded years worth of documents (5 boxes) and took care of old prescription drug disposal. The stuff that we couldn't take with us we either gave away, donated to charity or, sold at an estate sale.  Everything was made even that much harder because, we lived in a place where the motorhome had to move every three days.

Next, we had the final visits to our favorite places, our friends and family.... sadly, there's never enough time for everything.  After taking care of our personal, financial, medical, and legal obligations, we were ready to start our next epic adventure… A BRAND NEW LIFE.