Today marks 21 days until we leave Costa Rica. Three weeks. We officially enter a period of time that could be a “long vacation”.
Sadly, a vacation is something we’re not going to be having. Instead, we have a lot of things we have to do. Not just here, but also in preparation for our return to Calgary. In some ways, it almost makes leaving Calgary look easy…
In no particular order:
- Cancel our CableTica service
- Sell our car (currently trying, and having no luck at all)
- “Cancel” our phone (aka give it back to the company)
- Pack up the stuff we’re taking with us on the plane
- Have the rest of our stuff packed and shipped by slow banana boat (and I’m not really kidding about that — it probably is a banana boat)
- Arrange for our utilities in Calgary (gas, electricity, water)
- Get our cell phones working in Calgary (probably can’t do that until we get there)
- Organise the times/dates for moving our stuff out of storage and back into our house
- Arrange for plane tickets
- Arrange for hotels for moving (we have to stay at least one night in CR and one night in Calgary), and it they have to take cats
- Get a rental car
- Then buy a car in Calgary
- Figure out how to get what money we’ve managed to save up north so we don’t try carrying it across the border (read: bad idea)
- Arrange for documentation to prove that we can take our daughter out of Costa Rica (no, I’m not kidding — Temporary Residents need this for some bizarre reason, even if both parents are present)
- Make sure we can get our cat back into Canada (read: find all the documentation we had from 18 months ago)
- Clean our apartment top-to-bottom
- Give away what we’re not taking back to friends (and other organisations)
- Say “goodbye” to the people we’ve come to know very well over the last year and a half (this is going to truly suck)
- Make sure we have clothes that are cold-weather appropriate (at least until all of our other clothing is out of storage)
I’m probably missing a few things, and a couple of these have already been done. But there’s a lot to do, and not a lot of time to do it.
Deep breath
