A change of plans

Ok, here’s the situation.  Your parents went away on a week’s vacation and they left the keys to the brand new Porche.  Maybe I shouldn’t…  Yeah, of course I should…

Actually what’s happening is we decided to change our departure date.  When we got the visa and started planning a timeline we decided to leave in the fall so we could go to a close family friend’s wedding in October.  The plan was to visit Kelly’s family in North Carolina and then head to New York for the wedding, leaving for NZ soon after and arriving there in late October or early November.  This would also give us ample time to get everything in order for the move so we wouldn’t feel so rushed.  But as we started to put the plan into action we began to realize that staying those extra months was making the logistics much more complicated.  It meant we would almost certainly have to do two moves – one after our house closed to a short term rental for 2-3 months, then then another to NZ.  We would have to pay for this additional move, as well as storage of our stuff for those 2-3 months.  It also would have meant arriving in NZ not long before the holiday season starts.  This would’ve made finding jobs and a place to live even more difficult.  So it was a hard decision, but ultimately we realized we needed to adjust our date of departure earlier.

The new timeline is to do the trip back east to visit family in July, with our departure for NZ in mid-August.  It doesn’t change anything as far as selling the house goes (still on track for the tag sale next weekend and listing the week after), but it means that if we can negotiate to stay in the house until the end of July that we will be able to just load our things directly into the crate bound for NZ, which would be nice.  Probably most importantly, it does move up the timeline for getting the pets ready for the move.  The other complication is that it cuts down on the the time between the sale of the house and move.  With the old timeline we would’ve been able to make many of the arrangements (for example, hire the movers, the pet exporter, buy plane tickets, etc.) after the sale of the house and use the proceeds from the house to pay for them. With the new timeline we can’t do that, so it’ll be interesting to see how it all works out.  While we’re sad we won’t be able to make it to the wedding as we’d planned, we’re excited to get to NZ earlier.