Saying good bye to friends and family.

As our departure date loomed closer and closer we realized that we weren’t going to be able to spend one-on-one time with many of our friends before we left so we began arranging evenings where we would be somewhere, a restaurant or bar, and just let everybody know so they could join us if they wished.  The Cameo Ball turned out to be one of these functions that allowed us to spend an evening with quite a number of our friends all at once. 

We were slightly embarrassed when the Master of Ceremonies called us to the stage while they sang good-bye to us but all in all it was a lovely, very enjoyable evening.  Other evenings we spent in the company of several of our friends enjoying their companionship for what might be the last time for quite a while.  This process worked out rather well for us since our calendar was crazy with last minute things that needed to be done throughout March and April.

We were finally coming to an end of the process of getting rid of our possessions.  Final selections regarding what would go with us and what else needed to go where were being made.  We made arrangements to donate the remainder of our possessions with a friend who operates a thrift store in his ministry.  Resurrection Ministry scheduled a van to come pick up everything that we were not taking with us on the day we moved out of the condo, the last day before we got on the plane!

One of the single most time consuming jobs we had to complete was the scanning or recording in electronic format of our photos and important documents and we were finally bringing this to an end.  Our daughter and her friend spent hours at our kitchen table when they were not at class or at work helping us with the photos.  It was so very hard to throw 30 or 40 years of photos away!

We were still selling the last few things, so people were coming by to pick stuff up and we were making almost daily trips to the post office to ship items that were bought from e-bay listings.  Gradually the condo was emptying out.

Little, yet important things also needed to be handled.  We personally updated our wills and trust and had the changes notarized at our bank at the same time we closed our local accounts.  We put the hard copies of our wills, trust, passports, birth certificates, insurance policies, etc. into a book that we left with the executor of our estate with copies for us and a copy to the backup executor.

Interestingly, with all we had going on, we found that it was next to impossible to do without a permanent phone number or permanent address.  We planned to truly be vagabonds, renting wherever we wished to be, for however long we wished, or could be there.  We solved the permanent phone problem through Skype who provides us a local Arizona number with voicemail for $60 per year.  The permanent address problem was solved by using the executor of our estate’s address (thanks Ed we really appreciate you!)

We worked very hard to make the permanent address a very small problem for the executor by changing all our investment, banking, credit card and other correspondence to be delivered via email.  We had also tested the effectiveness of this by having our other mail forwarded to the condo we were staying in for several weeks.  The result was good as we found that primarily junk mail was being forwarded and we were successfully receiving important information electronically.

Our friends got together and planned a phenomenal “going away” party for us, we were astounded at the outpouring of love and support even though we knew many of them thought we were crazy!  We knew that although we would be going to an entirely new life our friends here in Arizona would always be with us, and would be counting on us to stay in touch.  FaceBook, Skype and Gmail were going to get a regular workout!