Moving to Sweden: Day One

Hello friends!

I apologize for the lack in update. We made it to Sweden safe and sound, and without any mishap! Hurrah! It took me a few days to finally settle down enough to sit and write a real post with photos and everything, but that's neither here nor there. Here we go!

image via Google Maps

July 28th was our last official day in Ireland.
We had a few things left to clean and pack, so the days leading up to our departure date were understandably chaos.

our living room. This was after we brought everything from upstairs to this area to be sorted and packed.

Some of our friends were fantastic enough to offer to help us out by coming up after we left to clean up, so that was a major relief for us. We were met with an outpouring of support from our friends for this move - something that neither V nor myself have experienced to such a degree before. It was overwhelmingly wonderful. Tears of gratitude may or may not have been shed.

V and our friend Przemek folding an old mattress into quarters to tie and take to the Skippo.

We had a surprising amount of rubbish. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, since we were purging ourselves of most of what we own to go into just one van - but yeah! Lots of garbage! We ended up buying a Skippo Bag, which essentially is a large, sturdy, disposable bag to fill with all of our "getridofables". We paid a fee and a big truck with a crane would come to collect it and take our cast-off items to the dump to be sorted and disposed of after we left. Nice, eh? Super convenient for us too.

Who says that video games aren't useful. I put my many years' experience playing Tetris to work while packing all of our various sized boxes into the van.

Finally, it was done. Just in time too! We put the last items and loaded the cat into the van at exactly the time we needed to in order to make it to the ferry on time: 11:15am. With a mildly tearful final wave goodbye to the house, we were off and onto the next adventure.

Goodbye, house!

Two and a half hours later, we arrived at Rosslare harbour and set eyes on the ferry that we would ride on to Cherbourg, France.

it's the one in the back

Perfectly timed, we arrived and were loaded onto the boat within about 15 minutes. Once we took Bilbo to his quarters in the "cat room" below deck, we went up to check out our quarters.

It was small, but nothing to complain about. I just cared that there was a bed - since I knew I would be in it for most of the journey. I get terribly sea-sick, you see. After we dumped all of our stuff in the room and took a quick shower (something that in our haste, we were unable to do before we left our house), we investigated the food situation onboard. Nothing to write home about, to be honest, but it was enough that we weren't hungry anymore.

Once we set sail, I tried to walk around a little and enjoy myself. I loved the wind and the sea smell, and the sound of the waves crashing on the boat...

sorry my video is squashed... not sure what happened during upload - and no, there's no sound.

...but me and boats were not meant to be. I spent 13 hours of our 18 hour journey in my cabin trying to sleep rather than vomit. Fun times. 

Part two of this series comes tomorrow! Land ho!