Category Archives: Uncategorized

I’ll start with the good stuff: we are in Portugal, staying at a lovely hotel in Lisboa. We arrived when we planned, and our luggage miraculously made it, too (more on that in a bit)! Travel started at 3:00 AM PST on Monday the 20th. Originally the flight had a 10:30 AM departure, but thatContinue reading “The complications of Coronavirus Travel”

I am posting this note the night before we leave the country. We’re jumping out of our skins excited. We’re sad. We’re nervous. Forget about sleeping tonight! The past few days have been a blur: Thursday morning, I took the kids to get their final “Healthy to Fly” papers, and then had to FedEx someContinue reading “It’s finally happening”

I’m a pretty good planner and organizer. I actually enjoy it. My normal mode of operation is to have as much stuff planned ahead as I can, typically with at least two contingency plans if things don’t work out or circumstances change. I’m also an early planner. Our social calendar typically has things scheduled weeksContinue reading “Details, details, details”

Now that the temporary crisis about entering the country is apparently resolved, we return to the regularly scheduled broadcast. One of the top five questions that I get asked about the relocation is, “How will you move your pets? Won’t they have to be quarantined for months?” This is a lot simpler than most peopleContinue reading “Our furry family”

My next article was supposed to be about the pets. Unfortunately, there’s something a little more critical to report. All this week, we’ve been seeing news about the possibility of the EU closing their borders to travelers from the US, Russia, and Brasil because of our climbing Covid rates (and our overall inadequate response toContinue reading “Special COVID bulletin”

We suffer from the same problem a lot of people have – too much stuff. We have furniture, kitchen appliances, books, and electronics.We have an overabundance of musical instruments, paintings, and arts and craft supplies. We have clothes – and since we live in a four-season climate, plus we like to look nice, plus bothContinue reading “Divesting of our worldly goods”

International relocation can be challenging, even when everything goes smooth. Wouldn’t you just know that as we got close to the end of nearly four years of planning, a massive monkey wrench would drop into the works in the form of Covid-19?Our original goal was moving to Porto around the beginning of July this year,Continue reading “House hunting under lockdown”

Once Portugal became a real possibility, we had to make some decisions about where and how we wanted to live. Now, if you’ve known us over the years, you know that we used to move around. In the first 15 years Kristie and I were together, we lived in 14 places, including intracity and intrastateContinue reading “Where are we going to live?”

As we get closer every day to our long-awaited move to Europe, I’ve decided I’m going to try and keep a record of the experience. My intent is to share regularly with friends and family – we’ll see how well I can keep up as we go along. Once question I get a lot –Continue reading “So, Why Portugal?”