Today is Monday, the beginning of our final stretch in the house in Granada, Nicaragua. We are scheduled to be moving out a week from this morning around eight that morning. There is still a small amount of confusion over if we are supposed to move out Saturday or Monday, but at the moment everyone is settled on Monday so it looks like that will be what we are doing. The owners of the house have new people moving in on Monday afternoon and want the morning for Johanna to get the house ready for them. So we worked out staying there Sunday night and taking off as soon as I can rent a car that morning. Dominica booked a hotel up in Jinotega for us to spend next week.
We did some talking today and suddenly realized that all of our details plans for the upcoming year were completely made around factors that no longer existed. When we had scheduled everything it had been because I was working at Change and we had to have certain Internet access and our changes between countries and our expensive, time consuming cruise was based on my forced vacation schedule with Change (the use it or lose it vacation policy that they enacted after I started after having made such a huge deal about their vacation rollover benefits when I was hired but taking them away before I ever got a chance to use them.) But I am not working for Change and the need to take “vacation” from our lives really does not exist and certainly there is no need to be off of the grid or spending a fortune on a cruise or switching countries at that time or anything that we had based all of our year planning around.
Suddenly we realized that we have been continuing on a course that no longer makes sense and everything that we are planning for the next year, or even longer, should be rethought completely. It was a head-exploding kind of day.
So we began to kick around ideas about what we could be doing instead. We both really miss being in Europe and were not too happy with how little time we would be spending there this year and so started looking at what it would take to return there rather than going to South America. Europe is relatively cheap while going to South America is incredibly expensive, for starters.
We kicked around a lot of ideas and after much searching Dominica found an amazing house on the Island of Crete in Greece and put in a request to find out if it is available and how much it would cost for the time that we want to be there. The house looks amazing. Just five hundred metres off of the Mediterranean and with lots of space for us. An old Greek cottage that an architect has redesigned personally with a very modern interior.
We ended up getting the cottage and we are so excited that we are heading to Greece and Crete in January now! Talk about a total change of plans. Now our whole year and been thrown up in the air, but at least we have a place reserved in Crete. No idea how we will get there or where we will go from there, but we have something.
This evening we watched some shows about Greece and we watched My Life in Ruins. Luciana, out of nowhere, asked where the stuff in Greece was and when we told her she said “I want to live there!” So she is getting her wish. Pretty cool that that timing worked out that well.
Liesl is excited as well. She can’t wait to see the ancient ruins and to give us a tour of them and show off her knowledge of columns. She has been studying ancient Greece in school recently and Dominica is going to focus on that now so that she will be extra prepared for being there and get the most out of it. Crete has the oldest ruins and longest history in all of Greece so it is a perfect place to be starting out tour of the region.
Now we have to figure out where we will go after Greece, how we will get there and back, when we can return, where we are returning to, etc. This all gets very complicated again.