Monday, May 30, 2011

Logistics Continued...

We have a green light with Guadeloupe schools!  We are now busy working on getting through the next big hurdles:

- Long stay visa
- Housing
- Renting our Toronto home

Ahhh logistics.

Monday, May 9, 2011

The Adventure Begins...

Here we go! The family is getting ready for its first year-long trip to a new place. We hope to do this a few times over the next couple of decades, but only time will tell if we manage to pull it off.

We hope to plant ourselves in Guadeloupe starting in September. With over a dozen trips to France over the last couple of decades and our kids enrollment in a French school, it's a natural choice for the family. Guadeloupe also seems like a good place to get my head around social entrepreneurship. One day, I'll be able to step away from my role at ClearCenter and get busy with career 2.0. But that's for another blog post.

Now comes the hard part: logistics.  The big challenges include:

- Schooling
- Visas
- Housing

You can throw in insurance, transportation, communications and a couple of dozen other tasks too. Right now our focus is on the biggest hurdle - schooling. School enrollment may prove impossible since we are non-EU citizens hoping to live for an extended period of time in an EU country (Guadeloupe is part of France). Home schooling is also a challenge in France, so there is no easy fallback.  At the end of the day, we have until late May to figure out school enrollment.   If we can't find a way into a school by the deadline, then we'll start to implement Plan B.

Fingers are crossed!  We'll keep you posted.



This should sound familiar: we don't have many family photos with everyone in the photo.  Note: the naked blue guy in the middle of the picture is not part of the family (much to the chagrin of our kids).