Headed to Atlanta Tomorrow for Our Visa

I am a little anxious, as we are getting all our paperwork in order to apply for our long term visitors visas in Atlanta tomorrow.
Getting everything together for the consulate is cumbersome....and here is why.

First, each individual passport holder must have his/her own appointment.  There are only two appointment slots per day.  So if you are traveling as a family, like we are, two people can get appointments on one day, and the next group of two must wait until the next day.  So it you are a family of five, it would take three days of appointments!  Perhaps when we get to Atlatna tomorrow, we will find out differently....but according to the website, we have to do it this way.

The other thing that is required for the visa is health insurance.  It makes sense that one would need insurance, but we did not know that we needed it prior to our appointment.  We figured that we could purchase it once we got to France.  Needless to say, we were scrambling last week, trying to figure out which insurance to purchase.  Buyer beware....not all insurance meets the Schengen Visa requirements.  Did I mention that I hate trying to figure out insurance policies?  Fortunately, I had connected with a woman who has been living in France for the past four years.  Her name is Annie Andre, and if you ever plan to do a trip like this, I encourage you to check out her blog...http://www.annieandre.com/blog/    Anyway, she helped me out big time!

The consulate also wants to know that we will not work while we are in France.  Again, I understand that they do not want us taking work from one of their own.  In addition, they want to know how we are going to support ourselves while we are there.  Rick had a letter drafted from his financial advisor.  In addition to these documents, we must provide a French translation of each one!  Fortunately, I have two wonderful local French women who have entered my life because of this adventure.  The first is my daughter's French tutor, Céline.  She translated the net worth statement for us.  I tried, but I was looking up every other word on Wordreference.com!  I gave it my best shot, and then Céline modified it so that they could understand it!   The other wonderful woman, Catherine, leads the French conversation class that I started taking on Thursdays.  She graciously reworded the "no work" document.  Now we just have to hope and pray that the consulate was not expecting us to translate the tax return!  Can you imagine?!

Praying that tomorrow goes well.

I thought that I would add a picture of us leaving the French Consulate.  The box is in Bronwyn's hands because THE REQUIRED VISA PAPERWORK FILLED UP AN ENTIRE BOX, INCLUDING THE REQUIRED FRENCH TRANSLATION OF EVERY DOCUMENT.

Although we were intimidated by the Visa requirements and worried that we would be rejected for some technicality, fortunately, the person who interviewed us was very nice.

The Yard Sale

One of the good things about going to France is that it is prompting us to simplify.  We've spent the past two months trying to figure out how to reduce the amount of clutter in our house so that the house looks bigger for potential renters and we have less stuff to store while we are in France. Bronwyn has done most of the work, but all of the older children have been summoned back to the house to sort through their possessions.  Each of us made piles of things that we couldn't part with, things that we would part with for a price (yard sale items), things that should be given to a charity and things that could be thrown out or recycled. (Some of us have secretly rescued things from the discard piles of others.)

In the short term, the result of our effort to de-clutter was to take items that were cleverly hidden in lots of nooks and crannies and spread them out in almost every room of the house. At one point, items were spread out for sorting in every room except the living room, which we preserved as our one haven from the storm of clutter.  When we moved all of our clutter away from the walls we realized that we really needed to paint some of the rooms, which in the short term led to further chaos.

The good news is that after a two-day yard sale, the amount of clutter is starting to lessen although we might have sold even more if it hadn't rained on Saturday.  I am still perplexed about what sold and what remains.  At 5:30 a.m., the professional pickers arrived with large wads of cash and they bought entire tables of items that we probably priced too low (my guess is that the same items will be sold at a flea market next week at twice the price).  Fortunately, we had plenty of inventory that we could use to restock the tables.  As the morning progressed, we had a mixture of shoppers.  Some people carefully researched values on the internet before haggling for the best bargain.  Others purchased items at the posted price that I was prepared to trash or give to charity if they didn't sell.

Late at night getting ready for the yard sale.

What did we learn from the yard sale?

1. Advertising is key - Bronwyn advertised through Craigslist, Nextdoor.com, email, and signs. The best thing she did was to make it clear that we would have the yard sale "rain or shine." Several people told us that they came to our yard sale in the pouring rain because we were the only yard sale that made it clear that the yard sale would happen regardless of the weather.  We were fortunate to have a large carport where we could hold spread out the items out of the weather.  We covered the open sides of the carport with large tarps.
2. Old area rugs, rusted file cabinets, and furniture sold (to our surprise).  Stuffed animals sold surprisingly well (at three for a dollar).
3. Books didn't sell as well as we expected.  Clothes didn't sell very well.
4. Kitchen items and classic children's toys sold well.  Complicated and expensive German building sets didn't sell.  (Everybody wanted to know if we were selling Legos but I couldn't part with them ... because the grandchildren will want to play with them.
5. We should have had more electronics out to sell.
6. Lock the doors to the house.  Although the yard sale was outside only, people walked into the house whenever we left the doors unlocked.
7. We should have planned on a two or three day yard sale from the beginning because once you get everything out, you just want to keep selling until everything is gone.
8. Schedule the Salvation Army pick-up truck for the day after the sale.
9. We should never have accumulated so much stuff and/or we should have started having yard sales years ago.
10. The people who come to yard sales are really nice.  We had a great time talking to everybody even though some people were relentless in their efforts to negotiate a better price.

Introduction

Why go to France for a year?

In June, we will be boarding a ship and moving to France for a year.    For the school year we will be living in the town of Angers and Joan will be attending a French school.  Angers is approximately 2 hours west of Paris near the intersection of the Maine River and the Loire River.  The home that we are renting is a 400 year old structure in the heart of the old city. 

You are probably asking why we want to do this.  There is no simple answer.  In part, it is a way for us to give Joan a great experience living in a foreign country.  In part, it is a way for us to rest and rejuvenate before Rick and Bronwyn start what are likely to be their last jobs before retirement.  Rick also likes to claim that he has a rogue gene in his family that causes generation after generation to constantly move to new places.  (He will be reversing about 500 years of family history by moving to France.) It also happens to be a good time for Rick to leave his work with the Catawba Riverkeeper Foundation.  We halso hope that a year unchained from our desks will also allow us all to get more exercise.  It also will give us (and already is giving us) a different perspective on things.

Bronwyn, Joanie and Rick

The process of preparing for a year in France is to simplify our life.  We are purging our possessions of non-essentials, giving a lot of things away and trying to remember why we allowed ourselves to accumulate so much stuff.  It is amazing how generous you become when you know that you will have pay to store everything.  We are also reviewing our commitments and activities to try to fulfill obligations before we leave and to figure out what we want to continue doing when we return to the U.S.  This may sound like the Biblical sabbatical year (see Deuteronomy 15) and that is probably not a bad thing.  (More abut the sabbatical concept at here.) 

In further preparation for our trip, Rick and Joan are trying to broaden their minds by learning French.   (In Rick’s case this violates a sacred promise to his French teacher to never desecrate the French language again.)  Bronwyn is polishing her French.  

We hope that as many of you as possible will find time to come visit us in France.  If not, you can keep track of us on our blog.  All of us will be blogging and to make it easier to figure out who is the author of each section, Rick will be blogging in black or white; Bronwyn will be blogging in orange; and Joanie will be blogging in green.