Mindy Carlson

The closer we come to the end of our Swiss Adventure, the more I am thinking about my friends in Maryland. I am getting very excited about seeing you again.

However, I am feeling sad to go as we take our first steps to move back.

We penned our “we’re moving out” letter to our landlord here last week. I cried. We mailed it Monday. I cried again.

Today I got an email from our moving company. They will be coming in a couple weeks to survey the apartment and make plans for moving our stuff.

We also have narrowed down our moving dates to two different dates. I can’t bring myself to type it out yet.  However, I do have strength enough to ask if we can fly Business Class. That is a looooong flight.

I’m going through items and clothes and starting to purge things from the house.  There is a great culture here of putting things in a sack, writing GRATIS on the bag, and having items from it slowly disappear over the day.  I’m on bag #4.

At the same time as I’m tossing things out, I’m also going shopping at the local flea markets (flohmarkt) and looking for furniture and decorative items to buy. I just picked up a great architectural woodcut print of different hot air balloons from the Victoria era. I’m hoping to maybe buy console table or maybe something else that catches my eye.

We’ve contacted Rob, our property manager, (who has been beyond awesome, btw) and let him know that we are moving back. He has made things so easy that we have decided to continue to rent out our house for at least another year and we’ve asked him to find a rental for us near some better schools. He’s been extremely positive about our decisions and he will start sending us listings in May.

Of course that hasn’t stopped me from hopping onto Zillow and looking at every single house for sale or rent in our preferred areas and then (of course) fantasizing about which houses we could possibly live in. Poor Mark. I’ve forced him to look at probably 50o houses on the internet. He’s been a good sport about it all.

Also in the “Poor Mark” vein, I’ve discovered videos of the show “Fixer Upper” on YouTube and am getting inspired on different things to buy and make. I just Googled “can you paint Ikea furniture?” I have also noted down dates for several flea markets here AND the Sweet Clover sales in Frederick. I will perhaps need professional intervention by the time we hit the US again.

I am also meditating on what else we need to take with us. More than furniture and crates of chocolates. (Although I am making a list of how many boxes of chocolates to bring!) I am thinking about habits, traditions, attitudes, and qualities that we need to bring along with us. There is a longer blog post in there and I will write it up for next time.

Well, that’s the update for now. 3 months left to go.  Lots of travel ahead and much introspection coming forth.