[Snowie]

Moving to Italy

As many of you know Jan & I are moving to live & work in Italy for a few years
Well the time has finally come and we are in the midst of final preparations for the arrival of the removal men on Thursday and Friday of this week.
As anybody who has ever moved knows, it is a stressful and chaotic time; well we are keeping our sense of humour – just about.

We are not helped as it is even more chaos at our house at the moment as we have furniture for 2 houses stored in one house, the last item we have purchased here to move with us arrives tomorrow, so after that we will not even be able to get into the garage. Needless to say it is difficult to find things and do the final sorting out – ‘‘now where is that important file with our Italian papers and Italian bank account’’, this type of debate is going on fairly regularly as we keep misplacing things.

Roll on Thursday morning when the removal men arrive and start to pack things up and put them in the truck, we should start to get some room to be able to swing the proverbial cat around in.

Next week on Monday and Tuesday we move into our new house in Modena and then on Wednesday night I need to be in Sweden for 2 days for work (not popular is an understatement) so the chaos will continue for a few more days.

Both Jan & I are really looking forward to finally getting settled in Italy, it seems to have taken us an age to get all of this sorted out since we found the house in January, the rental contracts are now all sorted and the house decorated and ‘ours’ from Wednesday this week.

It will be a big change in our life, moving to a new country, learning a new language, living together (I have been travelling in Europe and the rest of the world nearly every week for the last 10 years) and for the first time in 25 years having no kids with us – yippee.

We will miss the UK MINI2 community and all of the real and virtual friends we have made, however we will still be very active with both MINI2 and hopefully we will join up with Italian MINI owners and continue the fun and camaraderie of owning and driving a MINI.

Whilst we leave for Italy at the end of this week, we are back in the UK for the Himley Hall group GP display on 11th May and then we are doing the Charity ball as our swansong before we then drive the left hand drive GP down to Italy on 19 / 20th May via Stelvio Pass.

This is not the end, we will be back in the UK for the summer, and then again in November at the end of the Italian Job charity run – got to give the RHD GP some run outs from it’s storage

Anyone who is going to be down in Italy is most welcome to visit, we already have a number of bookings from friends and MINI 2 members – just send us a PM.

Happy MINI motoring to you all

Arrivederci

Alan & Jan

Some pics of our new house in Modena - plenty of parking spaces for MINIS