OK, we’re now sorta homeless.
With this first post I’ll get the backstory blather out of the way and get into the poor life choices we’ve made that lead us to this situation. May we serve as a cautionary tale to others. My apologies for the length. I realize it’s going to be an ordeal to read, but it was more of an ordeal to write. So feel sorry for me.
Amusingly (?), this began way back in the post 911 years with what we perceived as the increasingly authoritarian era of the Bush Jr. administration. So little did we know. Anyway, casting around for a “Plan B”, since things were getting “so bad”, Jeri found out she was eligible for Italian citizenship, due to the wise decision her paternal grandfather made of getting himself born in Sicily. Hey, Italian citizenship meant EU citizenship so we could go anywhere in Europe. What a great Plan B!
Turned out to be several years of amazing bureaucracy to deal with, as well as correcting inaccurate records. But finally, around 2010 Jeri succeeded and got her Italian passport. She was officially a citizen of the world.
But now we were in the middle of the first Obama administration, so no need for a Plan B. Life was good! Then came Trump 1.0 which was clearly an aberration, no? And a move to Albuquerque. And that pandemic thing. We weren’t going anywhere.
A return to SoCal, the post-pandemic rushed purchase of a too large house and Trump 2.0 revived the Plan B thoughts. The stars sorta aligned when we realized we needed to downsize and simplify. Maybe in that process we could add a little detour for a European stay, at least until (if?) the US regained its sanity?
Initially, we had always thought we’d be doing any long term European stay in Italy. We’ve been there many times and loved it. Best food ever. But we’d also been to France quite a bit, and it seduced us. To my amazement, so did Paris.
We’re both born and bred suburbanites. I dislike cities and could never live in a large city. Except Paris. I dunno why, maybe it IS magic? So our relocation thinking left Italy and landed in France, pretty much in Paris.
We’ve been married far too long, and for our fiftieth anniversary year, 2025, I figured Jeri earned some consideration for her saint-like endurance. We set up a one month stay (October 2025) in an apartment in Paris in the ritzy Saint Germain district. We wanted to see how it felt to “live” there. Turned out it felt pretty damn good. So we did a couple of things.
First, we met with a relocation service and put them on retainer. The service, Your Friend In Paris, assists people in relocating to France, setting them up for long term stays, and dealing with the substantial French bureaucracy. We weren’t committed to a move, but we were essentially purchasing an option we could execute if we wanted.
Second, we wandered around the different areas of Paris, looking at locations that just felt right. While we liked the Saint Germain area a lot, it was extremely busy and pricey. We focused more on the outskirts of Paris where things were quiet. As long as a place had Metro or RER train connections, it really didn’t matter where.
A place about 12 miles westerly of central Paris really struck us. It’s called Saint Germain en Laye (not to be confused with the fancy Saint Germain district in Paris itself). Bigger than a village, but smaller than a city, it felt just right. Sort of like a suburb. Had a Disney feel to it, bordered by a sizeable forest. Located at the terminus of an RER rail line, it was just a 30 minute hop into central Paris, with trains running at 15 minute intervals. We went back three times during our one month stay, and thought, if we do this, this is the place.
By the time we returned home in November of 2025 we were so worn from travel we both thought there’s no f’ing way we’re going to do this, but we let the idea percolate. By Christmas it seemed like a better idea, and we decided to tentatively move forward under a slightly altered concept.
The first thing is we were no longer considering this a permanent move. Leaving the US, setting up a new home in a foreign country and growing old there felt very intimidating. But a couple year adventure? Yeah, that could be fun. We still needed to sell our too large house and downsize, no matter what. The idea was to take the house proceeds, invest it and then either return to the US and purchase something smaller, or decide to stay in France and buy there. Choices!
So around Christmas of 2025 we started moving forward. We had to do a lot of maintenance to the house to get it ready for sale. We also had to do a lot of maintenance on ourselves, medical and dental, to get us ready. All things that needed to be done, regardless, so we weren’t locked in to anything. We could pull the plug anytime.
Unfortunately things took longer than we wanted to get ourselves and the house in good condition. We couldn’t get the house on the market until July of 2026. This gave our beloved president time to start picking on Iran and skyrocket interest rates. Just as our house entered the local market, sales just….stopped. Maybe three months earlier, we might have pulled it off, but with things so uncertain, nobody was buying in our community. Well, crap.
But something caught our eye. While home sales in our area just died, rentals were hot. We ran the numbers and if we rented our place out, it would generate a modest positive cash flow. Perhaps we could rent it out for a year or two, then sell it when times were better (Times will get better, right??). The absolute last thing we wanted was to be landlords, but there was some attractiveness to it all. So….huge pivot. Let’s increase our workload in the middle of an already huge project, shall we?
We had the damn house leased out within a week. A number of really fine applicants, and we ended up leasing to a really nice family, newly arrived from Australia. For the first time, we had reached a point where we couldn’t unwind things. We had to be out of the house by October 1st. The shit just got real. Much fewer choices.
While this was all going down, we were also working on the France side of things. This meant buying airline tickets (requiring a travel date be set) and lining up interim accommodations. Our relocation service would handle getting our permanent apartment, but that would take about two months. In the meantime, we had to handle our initial lodging on our own, typically an AirBnB. We set it up to stay the first month in central Paris, more for fun, then relocate for the second month to Saint Germain en Laye. Nice plan.
The airline tickets were paaaainful, flying Air France, one way Business Class. Yeah, yeah, totally indulgent, but there were certain unobvious upsides. AF Business has insane baggage allowances, which we needed. We could both check two pieces of luggage weighing 70 pounds each. That’s 280 friggin’ pounds of crap between us. In the cabin we each could bring two carryon bags AND a personal item, as long as the total was less than 40 pounds. So the fools at Air France were going to allow us to drag along up to 360 pounds. So Business class….yeah! For an indefinite stay in a foreign land, we wanted as much crap along as possible.
So the plan morphed a bit and we’re now straddling both countries, one eventually winning. Our house will sit there quietly paying for itself, run by a very good property management firm, so we don’t have to do anything. If/when the market improves, we can sell it remotely. We have our more valued belongings in a long term storage locker, either waiting our return or shipped to us. For now, we are maintaining our legal domicile in California for a variety of reasons (we are just “visiting” in France). This means we get the privilege of paying California taxes. So not exactly what we envisioned, but it lets us pull this off. I’ve taken to calling this our last, great adventure. I certainly hope it is. I am old and out of energy.
So, with that small subset of the total backstory out of the way, here’s where we’re at.
After being rendered homeless by the nice Australians on October 1st, we’re currently ensconced in a very nice extended stay hotel not far away for a few weeks. This gives us time to do last minute things and offload our two vehicles. In mid-October we fly to Paris.
Sounds serene, doesn’t it? Well, with three weeks until we depart for Paris, our first month’s AirBnB accommodation cancelled on us. Paris is really hard on short term rentals and many people are using a legal loophole to continue to rent out their units. Paris has started cracking down on this, levying very large fines. Our host, at the last minute, decided it was no longer worth the risk, so….Sorry. Great. We now had to find an alternative one month rental, only three weeks out, as we’re trying to exit and finalize our house.
After considerable panic, I was able to line up something with a licensed short term rental agency. The “licensed” part means much more expensive. And I couldn’t book a full month, just 25 days. But it was a landing spot, so I grabbed it. Fortunately, I was able to get our Saint Germain en Laye place moved up to cover the shortfall in days. It’s the things you don’t expect that bite you in the butt. A failure of imagination, as they say.
But for now, everything seems OK (until it isn’t again). Our stuff is stored, our house rented, our flight not cancelled (yet) and we have accommodations locked in and paid for until almost Christmas. At one time this all seemed like a good idea…
God damn, this is a lot of blather. Even for me. But I warned you.