Some advice I heard more than once about moving to a new country is “Get comfortable being uncomfortable”. I feel like I/we had discussed this enough, speculating about the things that might make us feel a little nervous (What if our containers get lost at sea? What if we don’t grasp the language? What if finding a house is really as difficult as everyone says? What if we hate it?) For each of these “what-if’s”, there are 500 more. But then, we see so many brave people who move to new countries every day. People who do it without the help of major corporations and their global relocation teams. This post could go in a whole different direction with everything going on in the world today, but but I’ll keep this little first world problem story short, focusing on the day we left.

So back to the idea of get comfortable being uncomfortable. We were prepared for that to begin when we got off the plane, not the moment we woke up, with 9 hours until our flight. The plan was to wake up, have an easy morning, fine-tune our suitcases, clean up the house, say “later, gator” to some family and friends. Things we didn’t plan on:

• Waking up to a really great thunderstorm-and no power…
• …which wouldn’t have been a big deal at all, except for the moving company didn’t move the furniture and household items we were going to keep at home to our shed, like we had planned, so instead we spent the first half of the day loading in the wet, dark, muddy, wetness (double wet, I know!)
• Mavis the dog gets stuck under shed a few minutes before she’s set to start her journey to Sweden (Luckily our very own dog whisperer was there to coax her out!)
• Power went out, again, just before shower/final pack time (cursing the tankless water heater!)
• For some comic relief, My SIL found a frozen umbilical cord and placenta pills while she was cleaning out the freezer. (They were promptly buried and spread…the cup plants should be well nourished this summer!)…was that TMI? Are you feeling queasy wondering what you have eaten out of our freezer?
• After a tearful goodbye (thanks to a beautiful video montage made by sweet friends), we were off! We made it to Sweden…but our luggage only made it as far as Paris.
• Who needs luggage when you don’t have a place to stay? Our paperwork showed the wrong address for our temporary housing, so we show up at this house that could easily be apartments, and matches the photos the reel company sent via email. Luckily, and sort of confusingly), the taxi driver had a different (and correct!) address, and the property manager answered her phone on a Saturday night.

The end.

Nowhere to go but up from that day, eh?! We were able to change the address on all of our paperwork so the dog and luggage and air container would make it to the right place, and snuggled in to enjoy the weirdness that is summer solstice this far North.

The next day, our luggage arrived, and the next phase of life began.