Buying a boat in a foreign country with a different language is challenging.  Most of the paperwork during the buying process was in French, and the operations manuals, documents, labels, etc. on the boat are also mostly in French.  Fortunately many of the people we interact with speak at least some English. Google Translate is also a wonderful tool for communicating with boat work contractors and for shopping!  Dave spent many hours with his iphone and talking to a French worker’s iphone discussing the day’s plans.  Thank you Siri!

When we realized the standard tourist visa for 90 days wasn’t going to work for us, we applied for French long stay visas which will allow us to be in the “Schengen” countries, similar to the European Union, for a year and then the visas can be renewed for another year.  In spite of intimidating instructions on the French Consulate’s website we breezed through the interviews in the San Francisco consulate in January and had our temporary visas in about a week.  After arriving in France we sent a form to the Office of French Immigration and Integration (OFII) and, after receiving a letter back from them, rented a car for a day and drove in to the OFII office in Montpellier for a medical evaluation.  We figured they want to make sure people aren’t coming here just to take advantage of the low cost medical.  We went to a radiology place and had chest Xrays, then walked about 10 minutes to the OFII where we met with a doctor who asked a few questions, took our heights and weights, and had us read a line on a vision chart.  Back to the waiting room for a couple of hours then, just as we thought they were going to come tell us we had to come back after lunch, we were called in and after about 10 minutes we were officially French residents!  We got a residence permit glued to our passports that we can renew in a year.   We also paid French “taxes” of 250 euros each to finalize the visa process.  But it should be worth it, this way we aren’t limited to 90 days in any 180 days which would have been the case on a normal tourist visa.

In February 2017 we winterized our house in Anchorage and our good friends Amy and Cal agreed to take care of it for us.  We had our mail forwarded to them, and headed to France again on February 14, our 2 year wedding anniversary!  It was spent madly packing, preparing the house for being away for 3 ½ months, and taking 4 large boxes to the post office to be shipped to our Outremer contact Pierre (he offered to let us ship things to him, something he would regret later…).  In addition those boxes we had 3 checked bags each on the plane, including Bike Friday folding bikes that come in a Samsonite suitcase – sweet!  We tested them in San Francisco in January and loved them.  Those bikes plus lots of tools and stuff to make living on Wally easier and more comfortable added up to 6 checked bags, which we vowed to never do again.  Amazingly, all 6 of our bags showed up at our destination of Montpellier, the largest city near Wally, but the 4 shipped boxes got stuck in customs.  Thankfully Pierre spent a few hours at the customs office talking them out of charging us several hundred dollars in Value Added Taxes (VAT).  Dinner for Pierre and his family was on us!

The thought of living full time on a boat was a bit scary.  We weren’t sure how would we adjust to a small space relative to our comfortable house in Anchorage.  But after spending a few weeks aboard we realized how little we really need, and that we are happy together wherever we are.  Who needs a house full of stuff anyway?