When we started our blog, it was mainly for our own purposes, to keep track of different aspects of our move.  We feel honored that so many of our readers follow us regularly, and some readers aspire to follow in our footsteps and make their own journey to Florida to be closer to the Mouse.  🙂    In response to that, we attempt to post regularly, and to provide more informational blog posts that may help you with some of the major decision making that goes into a multi-state move.  There are times that we share a blog post, and think “Really?  No one is going to want to read that, it’s boring!”, and then we receive a few comments that encourage us that yes, you really want to hear about it!  Today we wanted to share with you what our day looks like three weeks before our move, to give you a feel of perhaps what to expect when you experience your relocation.

Saturday is typically a very routine day in the Vitek household.  We always begin with a trip to the library to return and check out different materials.  We are very heavy users of the public library, it’s not very often we miss a visit, and we intend to keep up the routine once we make the move.   We have two libraries in which to choose from in Clermont: Cooper Memorial and Cagan Crossings:  we will most likely select Cooper Memorial as the library we most often frequent as it is closer to us than Cagan Crossings.   Library cards must be applied for online, so we will do that the week of our move, so that they will be ready for us the following Saturday.

After the library we came home for lunch, and waited for a Craigslist exchange, twenty more dollars earned for our piggy!  We then went to our oldest son’s apartment again, then off to Festival Foods to do some grocery shopping.  We’ve been researching grocery stores in the Clermont area, and we do believe Publix will probably end up being our store of choice, although we’ve heard some good things about Sweetbay, so we may check that out as well. We pulled up the advertisement on the internet and the prices are quite comparable with what we are currently paying in Wisconsin.

We came home and unloaded our groceries, and went through the kitchen cabinets to see what else we could offer to Nick, and it ended up being quite a nice pile.  He will get more once we are down to our last couple of days, but it felt good to be able to clean out items and not have to pack them!   Saturday is also pizza night, and the big decision of where to order ensued.  We want to make sure that we have our favorites one last time, and tonight we chose Rocky Rococo, a large sausage pizza with breadsticks.  We waited to order until after 5:00, because we drive to pick it up, and we had another Craigslist transaction that netted an additional ten dollars.  We always watch a movie with our pizza, and tonight’s selection was Cars.  We still have yet to see Cars 2 in the theatre, but we plan to do that soon.

We did have a couple of minor *bad* things happen today.  One, the check engine light came on in the car.  We are hoping it’s just a glitch, as we just had the car undergo a 30 point inspection for the trip, including an oil change, and really can’t afford to put more money into the car at this point.  The second thing involved an accident with a glass of soda and our external hard drive.  At this point we’re not certain if any data is lost or if the device works.  The cord did get severely bent, however.    This is also another item that is not in the budget to replace.

Tomorrow we hope to finish up Ben’s room and make some progress in Catie’s.   The kids are a little nervous that their belongings will not be packed in time, but we keep reassuring them, that yes they will.  No toy gets left behind.  LOL  Nick is coming over on Monday to get some more of his things, and we plan to move the unwanted furniture into the garage, so we can Freecycle them.  We have a lot of odds and ends in the garage, and are going to be letting people come and take what they want.   Kind of like a free yard sale.  🙂

So that’s our day.  We didn’t get a huge amount accomplished today in terms of packing, but some days are like that.  We really like the fact that we’ve had plenty of time to sort through our belongings, so that we are not feeling hurried and rushed right now.  Six months notice was perfect for us; it was far enough away to not feel pressured to do everything at once, but close enough that we weren’t discouraged that it was so far away We do better with short term goals, but that’s just us.  You may find that a longer time period works best for you.

We wish all our American readers a very Happy Independence Day Weekend and please stay safe!  We’re planning a new blog post for Monday which highlights our local haunts, so please watch for that.   Mark is also working on a post that highlights a favorite Walt Disney World resort hotel, hoping to put that out later this week.