Well, it’s been a while since we made the decision to sell up everything, give up our home and travel!

AND THE ROLLER COASTER STARTS

And what a roller coaster ride it’s been so far! Life has thrown a whole bunch of curve balls at us. A family illness had created a delayed start initially. We have changed our minds about how to go about it at least a half dozen times … trying to second guess ourselves on how to go about selling our stuff and whether it was the right thing to do?! When we first tried to sell our belongings … guess what? Nothing moved .. it seemed no one wanted anything we had! We couldn’t just leave it all behind as we needed the money from the sale of our goods in order to do what we had planned.

CHANGE OF MIND … WHICH WAY TO GO?

So then we changed our minds and decided to keep our place and simply rent it out while we were away. That didn’t work at first either because again it seemed that no one was interested! Then 2 months down the line, we found someone  … We were now 4 months behind our original planned Thailand trip and 2 months later than the date we had planned to have sold up and headed to Europe on the PC!

Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances which life throws at one periodically, only 4 weeks into the let, things went horribly wrong. It was nothing we could have predicted and in the end nothing we could do to fix it! So we were back to square one!

HELPX

In the meantime we had discovered HelpX and this seemed the way to go because with all the hiccups and holdups we had getting to this point, we needed a way to get going and keep going without much outlay beforehand. Just one day prior to the renting plan falling apart ….we had accepted a HelpX position in the Pyrenees in 2 weeks time and the one thing neither of us will do is let someone down when we have made a commitment! We had to come up with a plan … fast!

WERE WE COMPLETLEY INSANE?

We were tearing our hair out and beginning  to doubt our sanity but we were determined not to give up on our dream just yet, although we could not actually see a way around the latest situation. We had lost so much time already and now had to rethink everything yet again! After a couple of days looking at each other in despair we suddenly said …. “let’s just leave. Go back to our original idea of selling up and leaving our home!”

But now we had no time to sell our stuff because we had the HelpX  booking and were under pressure for time. We rented a garage and moved everything into it in a week, put up our trailer tent on a caravan site and worked our last week from there. Packed it up on the Sunday, put it in storage which we had to pay for upfront until the end of October, (money is now a serious problem because with all hiccups and delays and not having enough time to sell our belongings, pay for the move and for storing our goods and our tent … all our savings towards our travels were gone!) … but we got on the bike and headed for the overnight ferry taking us to Le Havre.

We needed to be in Foix by Tuesday lunchtime! We had Monday and 4 hours on Tuesday to do 1020kms! It seems we were definitely going to have numb bum syndrome!

But we had to do it  …. It was the start of our new lifestyle and we could not mess our host about. Can you imagine what kind of review we would get and how bad it would look on our profile if we messed up our very first HelpX booking! This was what was going to get us moving on towards our goal of travelling Europe on the Honda pc800 for summer and beyond! We were and are determined it is going to work. Sunday 17^th June 2018 was the first day of the rest of our lives … We simply had to go!