Time is flying by and we are feeling the crunch of getting ready for the biggest adventure of our retirement.  There is only 6 weeks left before we fly to Spain and our preparations are well under way. As you know, our plan is to sell off our  furniture, car etc before we leave.  We have tried kijiji for the first time last week. It has been surprisingly easy to use and more effective than we anticipated. We have posted ads on kijiji  and within a few days the items have been sold. The challenge has been timing the sale of key pieces of furniture and our vehicle. We did not want to sell our items of convenience, such as washer, dryer and car too early, but we did not want to leave it too late either. Timing in this case is everything. So we decided that listing the car after the first week of November would probably provide us with the best timing. Well we were slightly wrong on the timing, we have now sold our car. The new owners take possession of our car Friday which means we will be without a vehicle on Saturday.  The selling of the car was a bit harder (emotionally) than we anticipated. Not having the convenience of a car makes planning for groceries and travel more challenging. We have lost the convenience of owning a car, something that we took somewhat for granted. Our washer and dryer has also been sold. We are now without the convenience of  a laundry facility within our apartment. There is a laundry facility in the apartment building, so that makes it relatively easy to do laundry until we leave Kingston.

It is somewhat disheartening to sell all our belongings when we still have not received confirmation that we have a visa.  We continue to wait patiently for word from the Spanish consulate as to the status of our Visa application. We don’t anticipate any problems, however it would be nice to know that the Visa is in place prior to selling all of our stuff.

We have a “Plan B” in case we are not granted a long-term visa for Spain. We are looking at a year of travel, with stops in several countries and areas we have always wanted to see. On the list are Australia, New Zealand and South America to name a few.

Well today marks the start of the next phase to our adventure. We have given our notice and will be officially leaving our residence by the end of December 2015. We have not heard from the Spanish consulate yet and ideally we would have preferred to wait until the visa was confirmed prior to giving our notice. However timing is everything and in order to give sufficient notice to the landlord we needed to give our notice now, so  we decided to take the chance. I guess time will tell as to how this will turn out.

We have begun the task of sorting what items we are selling and what items we will give to family, friends or donate. We separated our stuff into three categories, Sentimental, Functional and decorative/other stuff. This is not as hard as you may think. Once we started to let go of our attachment to our possessions the better we actually felt. It is somewhat enlightening and freeing to rid ourselves of all the “stuff” it is amazing just how much “stuff” we accumulate over time. We have begun to pack and sell our belongings,  this will help us move to the next stage of the adventure.