Some of the things we have had to do lately seem, well, interesting. Even to me. I never imagined a year ago that all of this would be happening, and all at once.
Have you ever had a dream that you just couldn’t let go of? Even if that dream didn’t make sense to anyone but you? My hand is raised right now. That’s me! Me! I have loved the country of Italy since I was a kid. I have loved the food and the language and the culture.
Yes, I love the country that I was born in too. I love it so much that i traveled in an RV to every state with my dogs visiting animals shelters and writing about dog travel for alms of eight years.
So yes. I love the USA. But I also love the idea of spending some of my years exploring another area of our beautiful earth.
But I also didn’t realize the amount of trouble it would be to be able to afford to “live simply”. I can see the end result in my mind. But right now, it’s very frustrating. But so was trying to find an affordable home in the USA. So I picked my battle. And went with Italy even though that meant more time and more work. We looked for homes in the USA for many years and just didn’t find the right one. But as soon as I saw a picture of the rusticò in Italy that needed lots of work…well…it just fit.
It fit for our jobs which is social media consulting and dog travel writers. It fit for the blog I’ve been writing every weekday since 2011. It was a story. A complicated one. But one I know we will make work. But…money.
Finding financing is almost impossible when you want to buy a home abroad in a quick manner. Cash? Pay cash? Although we have saved money and sold as many possessions as we can, we still needed that last chunk. So we made the decision to sell our only vehicle, even though we still need to make it to New York to catch that ship with our dogs in August.
And that is the reason we are now looking for a vehicle that we can pay cash for. Today. Or tomorrow. At the latest. Renting a car that allowed dogs for that length of time was double in cost. And hopefully we can sell the cheap vehicle we find before we leave for Italy to get a little of that money back.
All of this may seem like too much work and stress. And I agree. It is a lot of work and stress. And I loved that truck. But sacrifice is what we have to do in order to realize our dream.
I really knew this would be hard. But not this hard. However, for the years I have left on this earth with my dogs, I want us to live more and experience more. I want us to help more animals everywhere. I want to try! And that is why we have to sell our vehicle to buy a house in Italy!
