Milestones

A major milestone for the Baby Boomers Move to France blog. This is post number 20. Well maybe not ‘major”, but it is a milestone to me.

Welcome back to our blog. If this is your first visit to our site, we are a couple of boomers on an adventure of a lifetime as we move to France full time. We are learning the language and looking forward to living in a small village and getting totally immersed in the French language and culture. You are invited to come along. Hopefully we will inspire you to get on with your adventure too.

When we publish this post on Sunday June 1st, we will have just under 2 months (fingers crossed) left to get everything lined up for the move to France. We will also be moved into our temporary North Port digs.

So, what is going on this week?

We have a few things to do and update this week. I’m sure that I will be adding to the list below.

1. Move to North Port
2. Follow up on French car rental
3. Follow up on re-homing Artimis
4. Follow up on Traveling Mailbox mail forwarding
5. Follow up on VW sale
6. Close on house sale
7. Phone issues

Move to North Port

Whew, we made it. Milestone number 2 for the week. We moved into the North Port VRBO and are settling in. It is a tiny space, but we can make it work. I’m anticipating our place in France might be small too. Not this small but small. This will be sort of a practice run. LOL

We thought that we did a good job of purging. We will need to do some more. We unpacked and realized we still have too much stuff. We have some organizing to do.

Got all of our devices hooked up to the Wi-Fi except for the printer. There is always something. Getting the printer figured out will be another task for the list.

French car rental

I think I have the car finalized. I completed the paperwork, but I haven’t heard from the rental guy in France yet. The car will be a Renault Clio hybrid. You don’t see many Renaults in the states. My understanding is that this model is very popular in France and the rest of Europe. It is mostly a city car and is in the super mini class. It has an automatic transmission and highly efficient with actual 59 MPG and some reviewers eventually got slightly more than 63 MPG on mixes of highway and city driving. It is a 4 door with an additional hatch, so you get a lot of cargo space.

Re-homing Artimis

We are still working on this. I have booked an appointment with Cat Depot in Sarasota for the middle of June. I was hoping to find him a home. Cat Depot is a well-respected organization, and we have pledged a donation to help with all of the cats in their care. We will see what happens in the next couple of weeks.

Artimis is a very good boy just chillin’ on the bed.

Traveling Mailbox

This is an interesting process for me. I’m expecting our first shipment of mail via Traveling Mailbox to our North Port address today (Friday). It will come via FedEx. I will let you know how it goes. When we asked the owner of the VRBO about mail he said we can have mail delivered to the address by USPS, but he indicated that delivery is a little spotty. Hmmnn?

Quick update, I got a notification that our mail will be here on Monday. I’m a little disappointed that my first mail from Traveling Mailbox is later than they had mentioned. This is good practice though, because now we know that mail won’t be delivered on the date promised every time. I have another batch ready for shipment by FedEx. Hopefully this will go well.

VW sale

It looks like EB might have a buyer for the VW. Details to be worked out, but this is good news. One of the folks at Tervis might buy it. It will be a win-win.

Major Milestone: Closing on the House Sale

Speaking of milestones, now this is a major milestone. We closed on our house sale on Friday. Unfortunately, the funds got hung up due to the buyer’s title company, so we are anticipating that all will be directly deposited into our account on Monday. This will be the funds that we use for our house purchase in France.

We can’t tell you enough about how happy we are with our sales agent, Colleen Martens ([email protected]). She is with EXP and she did a fantastic job for us. Below is a picture of us at the closing with Colleen, we highly recommend her and her team.

Phone issues

One of the things that we are having a little trouble with is the phone. It seems that we must maintain a US phone in order to get authenticated with our bank when needed, I didn’t realize that the bank can’t authenticate via a foreign phone number. They won’t do it via email either. This complicates banking when we are in France. As I mentioned in a previous post, I want to keep our US bank for direct deposits of my SS check and my small pension check. I have heard horror stories of people’s SS check being delayed for months because they use a foreign bank. I know what you are thinking, so I went online to SocialSecurity.gov and confirmed that they will send the check to a foreign bank, however I have concerns with the system under the current leadership. Anyway, I don’t want to make any complicated changes right now. A little paranoid? Yes. So, it is a little complicated for us anyway.

First step is to go to Verizon and get their advice. Can we use EB’s old phone with her old number. Do we really need to change to a French phone number when in France? I’m thinking that the Apple store might have some ideas too.

I need to get back to work on the French bank account!

EB is set up to work from the VRBO now

One of the first things that we did once we got into the VRBO was set EB up to work. No problem getting her computer set up and Wi-Fi connected.

That’s it for this week

More to come next week as we try to figure out the banking authentication issues and also the French car rental. Then there is the Traveling Mailbox update and the day to day in the North Port VRBO.

Hopefully we will have a Mexican Train night with our Grand Palm friends.

We will have an update on our funds from the house sale.

We will have our conference call with French Connections HCB regarding our visas too. That will be interesting as we hope to schedule an appointment with the organization that will forward our visa application to the French consulate. Then it will be a waiting game.

So, stay with us and as always, we look forward to your questions, comments and thoughts.

Have a great week!