WookyTravels

The email we had been waiting for with baited breath arrived last Friday night at about midnight.  I was in bed, asleep.  For months now my nights have been spent hovering on the threshold of sleep with one eye open on my inbox.  I was exhausted.  But, as had become my nocturnal habit, in the early hours of Saturday morning, I roused myself fully awake and checked my email.

Sitting there in my inbox were two emails we had been waiting for since the end of June.  One from our lawyer and another from our agent both advising contracts had been exchanged with completion set for a week later.  I drowsily muttered something to that effect to the Wooky, then turned over and promptly went back to sleep.

I had imagined rowdy celebrations, laughter and probably tears at the relief of hearing this news but the reaction of us both was to sleep until late the following morning for the first time in months, and when we did wake up we just lay there for a bit, staring at the ceiling and not saying very much at all.

For the rest of the week we were both in a bit of a daze and, although sleeping better than we had for a long time, oddly bewildered.  Even now, over a week later, we are still a little stunned; it is as if we cannot believe it is really happening.

Saying that, we had quite a busy week.  I resigned my job Monday morning and lodged my tax return at the eleventh hour; we booked our flights to Bali and Palu, our overnight stay in Bali, and two weeks in Prince John Dive Resort, Donggala (and we are very excited that our stay coincides with Mona and Chris, a couple from Luxembourg we met there last year).  At Prince John I will be doing my Advanced Open Water to try and get my buoyancy under control and then I’ll either steal the underwater camera from the Wooky or we’ll have to buy another one!

The Wooky has also sold all his tools to a young Irish carpenter setting up in Melbourne and we are now in the process of selling all the garden stuff and as I write this random people are turning up periodically to pick up strawberry pots and garden furniture.  We have also cancelled the internet and will give notice on the flat on Monday.

So much achieved yet so much still to do.

Attending the gym has helped to keep us focused and it certainly helped take our minds off the long wait; if anything we regret not thinking about going to the gym earlier but the reality is we were not in the right frame of mind and it would have been hard to motivate ourselves to leave the warmth of the fire and head out to the gym on cold and dark winter evenings.

It has been a long wait of 6 months since we first put the house on the market in the UK; we have been in suspended animation since then and the longer the delay the more it cost us.  Plans have been made and changed so many times that it is hard to come to terms with the reality that we will soon be setting off and any plans we now make, while maybe not set in stone (it is Indonesia, after all), we will have a framework we can work within.  Had we been delayed one more week we would have had to rethink completely.

We will of course no longer be homeowners and on the one hand will not have the security that (allegedly) provides.  On the other hand, we now have more freedom to live and work wherever we want to without the constraints of a western debt.

It is exciting, daunting, exhilarating and scary – all at the same time.  We feel very much alive at the prospect of the future.