Well, the house hasn’t sold yet, in fact it isn’t even on the market; but we thought we’d better not wait to book an apartment in France – as desirable places get leased early. Once we decided to make our first move in August, we realized that the south of France is a very popular destination in the summer. We are not fans of crowds so we looked at the map and decided on the town of Rennes, in the Brittany (north west) region of France, to be our starting point.

Using the Airbnb accommodation website, we found and booked an apartment from mid-August through the end of September 2014. The apartment is small but the location, in the town center and across the street from the Halles Central Market of Rennes (www.les-halles-liberte.fr) is great.

So we’ll have a wonderful assortment of food vendors very close-by. Our apartment in Montpellier, this past February, was just down the street from the covered food market so it will be nice to again have such easy access to fresh ingredients and freshly prepared meal options. After all, food is a big part of adventure!

We also decided to book the next apartment in France, back to Montpellier for mid-Oct through mid-Nov. We’ve left a 10-day gap between destinations, in case we just want to wander a bit before settling in for another month. The total of our bookings is just shy of 3 months. We still plan to apply for the long-stay Visa for France, but in the event that it is not approved, we don’t want to overstay the 3­-month Schengen limit.

I started this blog post almost 3 weeks ago and even more has happened since then. We rented a small storage unit and have hauled 2 loads of boxes to our 5×5 “locker”. Once we fill that, we’ll shift to a larger unit but anticipate that we won’t exceed a 10×15 foot space even when we add furniture.

One more bit of progress to note, our second meeting with our realtor is April 30. The first meeting was last August and we think we’ve acted on all of his recommendations. Based on this next meeting, we’ll decide when our house is actually listed for sale. Our target is mid-May but it might shift a week in either direction. Oh, and we’ll have another garage sale to clear the boxes of items we won’t be moving to storage.

Enough writing for now, Chris is packing more boxes … visible progress!