My Move from Paradise to the City of Eternal Spring

At age 84, I decided to leave my comfortable but expensive rented house in Sarasota, Florida, a place otherwise known as "Paradise", and  move to an apartment in Sabaneta, a suburb of Medellin, Colombia.  Here is an acounting on how that move has been going so far.

First there was the packing. I have lived in Sarasota since December 1996, and in the house from which I left, since 2017. It was, and is, a two bedroom, two-bathroom corner lot home with a third bedroom which I made into an office, so that I have had my office at home for the past 15 years, complete with file cabinets that I never got rid of and much, much paper.

All this I had to rapidly condense into the two small bedrooms, two small bathrooms city apartment with limited living space where I am now.

I was also trying to finish several visa applications and was torn between trying to get rid of most of the contents of my house in one way or another, taking some of it with me, finishing my clients' applications, or abandoning the whole thing.

I decided against the latter.

I was to leave on the 15th of June. Unpacked and unready, I rebooked for the 18th .

Thus, at 4 in the morning, on the 18th, I was packing boxes at the house against the clock, and at 7:30 a.m., my good friend Dr. Jack, a fellow Rotary Club Member, appeared and gave aid. Jack, as old as I am, is  a specialist in communicable diseases who has repeatedly moved the field forward during his lifetime and who has lectured a lot throughout the world. He can seize up an emergency when he sees one and accordingly spent half an hour doing five hours' work. Not only did he make my departure possible, he shoved a reluctant me into his car, stomped on the gas and got me to the bus to Miami, the first leg of my trip that day, on time. I will always be more than grateful to him.

The bus trip was... a bus trip. It rained. Dog Bubbles, my six year old 6.6 lbs rescue Pomerarian who was making the trip with me this time, and I had two seats, and as a spoiled pooch he had the window seat of course and barked at passing 18 wheelers.

At the bus station in Miami we took a cab to the airport with a gabby cabby from Costa Rica. Our luggage sported a new 36 inch duffle-bag-with-wheels special from Walmart. It contained, among many other items, my Canon scanner and Epson color printer surrounded by a good part of any towels that had been available in the house, in the hope of avoiding damage to the machines. With these two items and my laptop, I could hopefully set up shop in Sabaneta on day one and continue to finish various work projects in progress. 

 Unfortunately, all this caused the bag to top out at 50 lbs...

Added to this was an old linen attache case-sized little suitcase full of paper representing the five pending cases I was working on, plus my laptop (30 lbs?), a double paper bag with Bubbles' stuff, and a dog carrier with Bubbles. Later on, at the Colombian border, I was tempted to try for a Refugee Visa to justify this type of luggage.

The cabby left us at the Latam Airlines door at the Miami airport and I tried to move with my freight. It turned out the dog carrier had a strap (thank God...) that fit around my neck. It caused the dog to end up somewhat upside down against my side, but obviously being a trooper, this seemed better to him than being left behind, so he went along and lay still.

At the Latam counter we discovered that the cabby had lifted the 50 pound duffle out of his car using the one hand hold that was not designed for the weight, and had ripped a good sized hole in the bag. He had also ripped the double handles off Bubbles paper bag. And all this for $27.00 plus tip...

On advice of those at the airline counter, the duffel got wrapped in purple plastic. Printer and Scanner were turned over and upside down about 200 times in the process. My hands were sweating.