Over 11,000 Miles in Seven Days

Bonjour de Paris!

It has been an action packed few months, but we have finally, actually, begun living in France. Holy shit! or, Putain de merde as our neighbors might say

Last week was a blur: First, a round trip from Sunday night (23 Nov) to Wednesday morning (26 Nov).

This was to “prepare the way” for us to bring our cat, Nigel. We didn’t want to have to keep him cooped up in his carrier even longer than the plane ride - to have him wait for us to get the keys to our apartment and then go get a litter pan / food / etc. to set him all up. - so we did all of that on Monday and Tuesday.

We also took some time to just take a breath and have a nice meal, of course. We are living in Paris now after all.

Then, back home on Wednesday. Thanksgiving down in Philadelphia, then over to southern Jersey to sell our car, then back to Hoboken to finish up (hah!) ⊕ This picture (from the 23rd!!) is the slightest indication of the absolute chaos that was the ’let’s remove all the crap from the apartment’ process. the apartment, since we were closing on 1 December and everything needed to be gone by 2pm that day for the new owner’s walk-through. Talk about stress.

(A quick aside: The only way we were able to get our apartment anywhere near ready for the walk-through was Dennis, Caroline’s cousin. He took care of most everything, including walking Caroline back from the ledge a number of times. Truly a life saver. We cannot thank you enough, Dennis.)

Next, meet some friends for a farewell drink and one last meal at the local where we have been spending our Friday evenings for the last fifteen years.

Then finally a car to the airport, a long anxious flight with a drugged cat, and then a car to our new (temporary) apartment. We arrived at our new home on Saturday 29 November in the early afternoon.

In case you were wondering, Nigel seems to be acclimating nicely.

And to think this all started with an offhand comment while we were in Spain with our nephew Andrew. The (amazing) food was so inexpensive, and then when we went out one evening and two drinks cost me a total of €5, I wondered aloud “Why the hell are we living in the NY metro area?” I mean, the actual answer at that moment was ‘Because that is where we’re working’, but the rhetorical weight of that question obviously had major repercussions.

That spurred a lively conversation, and started us Well, probably mostly me, but Caroline has been gamely enthusiastic through the whole adventure. We certainly wouldn’t be here if she had reservations. down the rabbit hole of “so how do you move to Europe?”

We started looking at Portugal, because at the time they were more than happy for people to essentially buy citizenship by dumping money into their country. Unfortunately we did not have the resources to take advantage of this easy-but-pricey route, and so it would be about a five-year process to get us a Portuguese passport. At that point, we assumed we would need an EU passport to enjoy Shengen privileges, since part of this (at the time) fantasy was the opportunity to be European nomads and be able to decide to, say, live in Italy for a year.

More research led us to discover that France also had a “five-year plan” available, if you will - one can apply for a long-term visitor visa, good for 365 days, which is renewable. As long as you’re not working and can show adequate financial resources (which really were minimal: they needed to see like $20,000 in the bank for a one-year stay), you are good to go.

And, after staying in France on this long-term visitor visa for five years, you could either (a) apply for French citizenship and get your French passport, or (b) apply for the Carte de résident, which is good for ten years (and also renewable). This lets you work in France, and will also grant access to the Shengen zone if we wanted to move around. So now a French passport is unnecessary. Also - selfishly, I might add - my Portuguese was non-existent, but I do have a base of French language education. From years ago, yes, but it’s still there somewhere (I hope).

Especially since the language requirements are lesser with the residence card, and also if we were to explore citizenship, I’m sure that they would look askance at our assets remaining in the U.S. Even with the current clusterfuck that is the United States government, I don’t think we’re ready to move all our assets to another country.

Anyway, France it was. Of course, we weren’t about to do anything serious until retirement-time, which came sooner than expected for me (a story for a different time). Caroline was on schedule for a late 2025 retirement, and so earlier this year I stepped back into Project Management Mode and started laying out the myriad tasks we would need to complete in order to get our asses across the Atlantic.

And there were many, many steps: collecting all sorts of papers, consultations with real estate / immigration / insurance experts for our visa requirements, the visa interview itself, selling the apartment, selling the car, getting the cat’s documentation, Nigel needed to be certified by the USDA. Even though we are not planing on eating him ¯⁠\⁠⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠⁠/⁠¯ deciding what to move and what to give away.

That is just a taste of what we needed to do. The most amazing part is that we planned all of this down to almost the last minute. I will refer you to the above outline of the past week. I’ve been joking that I have become an expert in just-in-time logistics; sometimes I have refereed to the events of the past month or so as “gear teeth perfectly meshing”.

In reality, we were extremely lucky and built a Rube Goldberg machine that worked almost perfectly. The worst things that happened were that United lost one of our bags for a day (no big whoop), Caroline left a coat back in New Jersey (but we’re fixing that as well), and we had some mobile communications issues as we attempted to check into out apartment (but they were also sorted).

I am astounded that almost every single piece fell into place exactly how it needed to. I really still can’t believe it.

So now we live in Paris. And we often say that to each other — not as a statement, but as an incredulous question: “So now we live in Paris?”

It definitely feels like we’re on vacation. Except that we’re on vacation with our cat. And a bunch of possessions that we would never have taken with us on a trip.

I am sure that it will sink in eventually, but for now we are living a slightly surreal existence. To paraphrase my (now) fellow countryman: Ceci n’est pas un vacances.

But a wonderful, exciting existence, nonetheless.