ALOHA~
I don’t know exactly where to begin, and this might be a long one, but we have officially moved to Honolulu, Hawaii!
The process leading up to the move was intense to say the least. This blog is dedicated to that story! So sit back and relax while I take you through our journey, where I once again packed my life into a couple of suitcases and took a plane to find a new home.
“There’s a place I dream aboutWhere the sun never goes out.And the sky is deep and blue.Won’t you take me there with you.Oh, we can begin again.Shed our skin, let the sun shine in.At the edge of the oceanWe can start over again.“
The first thing we focused on was finding an apartment. We were not entirely unfamiliar with Honolulu, since we travelled there on three different occasions (pre, mid, and post-pandemic), but we didn’t know a lot about the residential areas. Since work is mainly remote for the both of us, commute time wasn’t an issue. We knew we wanted to be close to major stores and busy areas, but far enough from the city to be able to afford rent. We also didn’t want to be forced to own a car, so in real Dutch fashion we made sure all the places we wanted to regularly travel to were biking distance. Once we found an apartment building, it took us about 11 phone calls, 25 emails, 40 pages of paperwork and countless hours to finally get approved. Good – we get the apartment in Hawaii on the 14th, and our move-out date in Portland is the 24th. A bit of overlap, but it wasn’t too bad.
Then, we had to decide our final move date, and book our one-way tickets to Hawaii. Our lease ends on Thanksgiving, should we move on such an important American holiday? Would flights be cheaper on Black Friday? Did we have enough time to finish the paperwork for Abby so she was cleared to fly with us? We still had many questions, but every day you postpone the decision you get more anxious, so we just booked for the 25th. Hopefully it will work out!
The third major thing on our to-do-list was to start the whole process with Abby. Hawaii is a rabies free island and therefore has very strict quarantine regulations. In order for Abby not to be quarantined, we had to (once again) file a bunch of paperwork. The vet took care of most of it; it required a FAVN rabies antibodies test, a health exam, an acclimation certificate, and proof of vaccinations. It wasn’t hard to get, but the tricky thing was the waiting periods. We had a very specific timeline to work with and if we messed that up, it would make it harder or even impossible to fly Abby over.
Alright, so by now we got all the major steps done. We are about 5 weeks away from our move. Time to tell our employers our official moving date, time to submit the notice to vacate and officially end our Portland lease, and time to start thinking about what to keep and what to sell/throw out. Our work continues throughout this period and we both experience an increase of work hours (sometimes it’s like that). On top of that we decided to start taking Brazilian Jiujitsu lessons of 4+ hours a week, because we like life to be a little hectic and difficult. Our friends try to set things up, there’s lots of birthdays and some impromptu goodbye parties being planned. All the fun stuff! But it was a lot. It was a lot of ups and downs. Every time something was taken care of, something else came to mess it up. And I just couldn’t process everything that we were doing. It felt so surreal to be making these plans for ‘’when we move to Hawaii’’. There was so much uncertainty. Not to mention having to say goodbye to some really good people in our lives. It made this whole experience a bittersweet one.
Getting the apartment ready for move-out was the most time-consuming. We only collected a small amount of stuff over the course of 3 years, but still. You have to go through everything to determine what to do with it. We needed to significantly downsize, just because it would be too expensive to ship everything over. I already didn’t have that much; I left a lot of my life behind in The Netherlands when I moved to Portland in 2020. So the things that I had were all of sentimental value. We managed to pack our lives into 3 large suitcases, 2 small suitcases, 2 backpacks, and 4 large USPS boxes. The hard part was done! Exhausted, nervous, and excited we got on that plane to Honolulu. Leaving Abby behind at the airport and not being able to be with her during the flight was nerve-racking. The first thing we did when we landed and collected our luggage was run over to the Quarantine Station to pick her up. She looked exhausted and was shaking but luckily, she recovered very quickly once we got to our apartment.
What a strange experience to move into an apartment you’ve never been to before. The worst thing was that we didn’t have anything. Nothing to cook with, nothing to wash and dry ourselves with, and no bed to sleep in. So we had to pick ourselves back up and start shopping. We didn’t have a car to get around either, so we took a lot of Uber XL’s to help us transport some of the furniture. I must admit that we were both pretty out of it. The lack of sleep, minor jetlag, worries about Abby, and the intensity of it all hit us hard. Ultimately, you are the one to make it your home. So the next couple of weeks were spent adjusting, putting furniture together, and exploring the area. I think the hardest part for me was being patient in all of this. I often want too much too fast and something like this you just can’t force. I felt very out of place the first couple of weeks, even wondering if we made a mistake, but I had to remind myself it needed time. So let’s try and make Hawaii our new home! Stay tuned for more blogs coming up!
Amazing move well done.
Thank you! Will you be here soon?