Pack it up, red-blue-box, ship it out

The first question we mostly get when the Big Move comes up, is "What will you do?" (as in: What job are you looking for? You have a job right? My god, you don't?! How will you support yourself?!!). A life of crime seemed like the right career move, but people reacted sort of poorly, so now we say that we have a load of savings and that we can support ourselves comfortably for more than a year and that does get a lot of appreciative smiles (if only we had known that sooner). No worries, we have some skills and when we are good and ready, a job will probably find us, like it has always done so far.

The second question is always a tie between: What about your family? and What will you take with you? 

We answer both of those at the same time: not the family and not most of our stuff. Downright disbelief and/or a lot of well-meant advice on the essentials of migrating then follows. Most people agree readily on leaving the family behind, but some cannot for the life of them imagine that we could live without our complete household as it is now. This post is for you guys.

Filling up a 20ft or 40ft container is not an easy task and most of our furniture came when we bought the house. So it's between 8-10 years old, in need of repair (thank you furry critters) and sometimes cheaper to leave and buy anew then to ship because of the weight. When we moved in, we did not have a lot of stuff from the old house, which was a lot smaller (try 45m2) and we like new and shiny things as much as the next person. Then we had to consider that our current furniture might not fit into our new housing and then we'd have to store it and pay monthly fees for that, all the while having it grow older waiting for a spot to clear. Finally, shipping a container halfway across the world, have it gas-treated and bonked around by a well-meaning but slightly hamfisted crane-driver doesn't really add quality and lifespan to whatever is in it, so we came up with a different plan. Red.Blue.Box.

We'll take most of our clothes and other essentials to a max of 32 kgs in our two red suitcases. Laptop, tablets and other electronics we'll carry in our hand lugagge. Then we have two blue suitcases that will go by airfreight (muy expensivo, but they'll be waiting in Sydney), filled with another 25kgs of mostly clothing and shoes that we might not need immediately, but we either don't want it gassed (wedding clothes,Italian shoes and suits) or we don't want to wait for 2-3 months to have the use of them again. Also, it's sort of hard to figure out what to wear as the seasons are inverted. (it's summer there now and still will be as we arrive).

That leaves the box-category. Before we're done packing, we'll probably have 15 boxes (books, admin, cook ware, souvernirs, mementos and pictures) 2 bicycles, 2 divebags and 2 pieces of art. This will all be put together in one big custom-built wooden crate and put into a container with other crates to be loaded on a ship. As you can see in the online store, most of our stuff is already spoken for, all according to plan.

We've now found a mover  we feel comfortable with (Passies) and the initial date is set for the 15th of January for our boxes to be packed, tagged and shipped. Doing it this way saves us about 3,000 EUR on freight cost and provides us with the opportunity to start life anew with some new, undinged, unscratched, shiny things, while we still have the things that matter most to us both close by.

See?! Easy as that.....

Meanwhile in Poortugaal...

A lot has happened since the last post, some of it in preparation of the to trip, but most of it appears food related somehow. We seem to be eating out with friends and family all the time and we have at least 12 more diner dates planned before we leave. At this rate we might as well leave all our clothes and buy them plus-size on arrival.

Please take a moment to check out the timeline page, it's been updated and inverted, so recent events are now at the top.

In the meanwhile, here's a summary of the most relevant changes for our big Oz adventure. We've already packed up most of our stuff which seems to fit in less than 20 movers' boxes (that is just soo weird!). We've also opened a bank account in Australia, and yes we do accept donations to the cause in most currencies (including bitcoins). The webshop is quite the success and we've also managed to get rid of a lot of additional big and small stuff already. The quarantine procedure got remodeled, making it less long (30 vs 10 days) and costly (about a 1000 bucks) so good job DAFF! That leaves us with two cats, two pieces of art, two dive bags, two x two suitcases, ten x two boxes and two bicycles to send over. The connecting number seems to be two....while our house is getting more empty every day.

We've also secured lodging for the first couple of days: Our initial base of tactical operations will be here: https://www.airbnb.nl/rooms/928233 . As soon as we've conquered most of Canberra, we plan to look for more permanent rented space, but for our first strike, this will do fine from 6-17 February!

The coming week will probably be somewhat emotionally draining and painful (for Gil) as there's numerous people to say goodbye to and things to leave behind. Yuum's farewell party will be the 16th, Christmas party on the 17th and her last day will be the 20th. Gil wil be saying goodbye to 4 kung-fu groups and end up in the circle of death as many times during the week and if he's still alive, will then have his official work farewell on the 20th. By then we'll probably be emotionally unstable, out of tissues and humbled by all the kind things people have said to us, as some have done already, which we'll share with you later.