We did it. Almost one year to the day after our visit to this little village in the Loire Valley, when the wheels first started turning with ideas of moving to France, we are actually here.

It wasn’t so easy. We had help. Oh sure, we did lots of research on our own, taking advantage of the many forums online full of stories (good and not so good) from people who have taken this leap before us, but sometimes you just have to go for it. Research can only do so much. We talked and talked about our plans with family and friends, and anybody else who would listen, and I’m sure we bored the heck out of some people with our talk of moving here. I’m sure some thought we wouldn’t actually go through with it.

But we had a group of people, on both sides of this equation, who believed we would really do it and were behind us 100%, stepping up to help put all things in place to make it possible to move our lives halfway around the world. We had a whole lot of things to do. Big things. Like sell our house at the right moment, and find buyers who were open to us renting back our house until we were ready to move. Our realtor, Abby Tanem with Coldwell Banker, was confident that we could sell our house quickly, and boy, was she right. She knew exactly how to put out the word that our house was available, without listing it on MLS. We had buyers before we expected it, and it all fell into place seamlessly.

We had buyers for our cars right away too. My brother bought mine, and our friends bought Bob’s car, and they were even kind enough to wait until the morning we were leaving for France to take possession of it.

In France, things started happening in preparation for our arrival. Our dear friend Connie has been our agent on the ground, stepping in as our proxy in signing the initial papers for our house purchase and helping us wade through the process of getting our French bank accounts opened and buying a car. Last week she arranged for our electricity, water and other necessary services to be started for us. We worked with our new local banker by email — and Google Translate — to get money wired into our new accounts and ready for house and car purchases. Insurance here is often obtained from your banker so he did that for us too. Our new landlords, Jim and Pauline, got busy preparing their house for us to rent for a year while ours is undergoing renovations (fingers crossed it won’t take more than a year).

We arrived two nights ago and were met on the train platform by Connie, full of hugs. Our rental house, “Les Balcons,” was made warm and welcoming and even stocked with a few groceries. Jim and Pauline greeted us and proudly showed us how much space they had cleared for some of our things to be stored when our shipment arrives.

We’ve already been invited to several social events and our calendar is filling up. Life in France has begun for us. Our new chapter has started and we can’t wait to see how it unfolds.