T-Minus 1 Month
With one month to go before we hop on the plane to Iceland our days seem mostly filled with nervous anxiety and panic over how much stuff we still need to purge. The move dates are all set and we’ve got our hotel stays lined up. My lawyer seems confident we have everything to satisfy Iceland’s residency requirement, and yet I still worry about what we’ll do if we get there and run into a problem. Stress eating is in full swing, and that doesn’t help the mood either.
In work news, my current company has figured out a way to let me continue to do work for them as an independent vendor. It would be a part time affair, and slowly drop off over time, but it could provide a nice source of income during the first few months while we get settled. I think finding a job will be much easier once we’ve found our way around and the summer crowds die down a bit.
Pretty much every moment from now until we leave is scheduled with some sort of activity. I guess staying busy will help keep our mind off the stress. I have two more weeks of work to focus on first. Then, that following weekend, we do one more purge pass on the storage unit and get ready for the packers to arrive on Monday. The apartment will get all boxed up except for our beds. Then, Tuesday morning it’s load-load-load! We crash that night with some friends and then check in to a hotel on Wednesday-Friday nights. Wednesday & Thursday are for offloading the last of our things, including the cars, and cleaning out the apartment. Friday we do a small bit of relaxing with friends for a birthday party then get an early nights sleep. That Saturday we hop in the rental car and head south to see my parents.
The next week will involve spending some time with family and getting the storage unit loaded up with the goods we’re not shipping to Iceland. With that out of the way, we’ll be all ready to hop on a plane in Charlotte, fly up to Boston for a nice little layover, and then off to a new life overseas.
Once we arrive in Iceland there’s much, much more to be figured out still. We haven’t decided if we’ll try to rent a car for a couple days to get settled, or if we’ll take the bus in to Reykjavík. We’ll need to hit the residency office and immigration offices right away to get our paperwork moving. Hopefully that will happen quickly and we’ll have what we need to rent an apartment. We have no idea when our container will arrive in Iceland or how long we’ll need to store it or what we need to do to clear customs. There’s so much stuff that everyone tells us is no big deal because they do it all the time, but we’re totally in the dark. I just hope we can overcome the hurdles and get settled.
Once we have a place to live and I’m doing contract work and bringing in a bit of money, we can focus on the next things. Budgets, school enrollment, furnishings, and adventures. I wish we could just fast-forward to that phase.