After spending almost two full weeks organizing and cleaning our household items in our big old house, we managed to ship what we'll need in Czech Republic, sold what we can sell, and stored all the remaining stuff that our tenants would not need in our house.
It was indeed a chaotic process as Bob didn't get back until Dec 25th, and we had only one day to prepare for a yard sale on Dec 27th.
We managed to make it, though! We had good sales despite the bad timing for the yard sale. And then on Dec 29th, the movers came and packed all our stuff to be shipped. We had to identify which ones to be shipped of course, and we were so not prepared. However, we made that through as well.
After the shipping items were gone, the house felt very empty. I had almost no utensils to cook, but we had four people (+ gG) in our household and I had to cook by cutting veggies with an eating knife, etc! I felt like I was camping. Then, the last move happend on Jan 4th. We moved everything out of the house except the furniture our tenants wated us to leave. Half went into our garage and the rest went into the outside storage house. Whew! We made it.
Seeing our house being empty gave me a relization of us moving out of the country finally.
It was sad to see gG trying to go back into the house several times even after we put him in a car to drive up north.
We left our beloved house and neighborhood around 5pm on January 5th. Originally we wanted to leave around 1pm to avoid the traffic to relax over a glass of wine in Paso Robles, but we didn't make it. The last min cleaning took more than we anticipated. Thanks to Aura for helping us cleaning the house!
Finally we were on the road, but we were all tired from days after days of cleaning and packing for sure. By the time we got to Paso Robles hotel, it was close to 10pm. Since we knew we won't be having a chance to taste wine the next morning before we take off to Santa Cruz, we asked the hotel clerk to see if we can have a glass of wine. They kindly opened up the wine store they had at the hotel, and they even gave us a couple of free glasses of wine and sold us a bottle of wine, which we managed to finish amongst three of us that night. I guess we needed good tasting wine to really calm our nerves :)
The wine was reasonablly priced and tasted wonderful!
Next morning, we woke up late, packed our stuff again (including gG's litter box on the back seat), and left for Paso Robles downtown to send the last four boxes via US Postal Service. The van we were driving felt much lighter after unloading the boxes for sure. gG was happy that he now got more space to relax and be away from his litter box. We strolled around downtown Paso Robles before taking off to Santa Cruz. It was such a beautiful day, and we surely wished we had one extra day to enjoy more wine and the cute town of Paso Robles. We shall go back there some time again!
The drive up to Santa Cruz was just gourgeous. The sky was infinitely wide and blue, and there weren't too many cars on the road! We enjoyed the drive for sure.I have never been to Santa Cruz, so having an opportunity to visit the school Ko-chan went before taking off to Czech Republic was a pure joy. I loved the town! It had a very earthy feel to it, and most of all it was a cute little town surrounded by the ocean and mountains and full of young energy.
After spending more hours than we expected in the beautiful town of Santa Cruz, we drove further up to SFO area. Got into the hotel around 7pm. We were again very tired, so we just ordered a room service and ate some random last supper in the US. gG was doing very well the whole time, and I was very proud of him. He was so relaxed even in the hotel rooms, but I could tell that he started to realize this trip was not just a regular trip and that he would not go back to our home in LA soon. Poor gG.... I was so worried about the long flight from SFO to FRA the next day, but I also believed he was tough enough to make it through just fine.
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