This week Henry and I made a ‘things to do’ list. When you look though the list you may think ‘blimey, they have a lot still to do!’ and we do. I have only one more week of work left until I’ll have much more time to dedicate to all the research and preparations; and update this site accordingly.

• Passport (mine) (I plan to get the form filled in and photograph taken before leaving work as I know plenty of teachers there who can sign for me)
• Immunisations – I have an appointment booked with the practise nurse but I have to fill out the form and this means coming up with a finalised list of countries.
• Travel insurance (and life insurance for Henry?) (I already have cover as a homeowner) (some people have also asked if we have wills and I suppose it is something to consider)
• Flights (we plan to just buy the first flight to southern India)
• Visas (again, we need a list of countries)
• Buy luggage (research started but it is a tough one)
• Sort out our home (I have made a good start of getting rid of some of the mountain of general stuff I’ve accumulated in ten years of living here; mostly clothes and some small items but I’m nowhere near the end of this task.  We need to sell quite a few things but many of these like our sofa and our bed we’re going to be needing for a couple of months yet   Also included in this point should be the maintenance jobs required before we could rent it out.)
• Get a new mortgage (buy to let)
• Rent our home (my initial research has convinced me that we will be going with a managed service from a lettings agent and paying a monthly percentage for them to completely look after it.  It seems it will not be hard to let as houses in the town are in demand, partly due to the increasing difficulty people face in obtaining a mortgage.)
• Landlord’s insurance
• Forward mail (to my mum’s)
• Sell our cars
• Join an agency so we can do some house sitting on our travels
• Cultural research and research into destinations / attractions / where we’re going / what we might be doing there
• Buy a camera
• Join / subscribe to some sort of cloud online storage (picassa and flickr seem to be the front runners; we both already use dropbox for documents and love it but I’m not sure about paying them for sufficient storage for photos when other sites aimed at photos display them more attractively and some (like picassa) allow offline editing in specialised ipad software)
• Get a credit card each and some sort of prepayment currency card (and some cash of course.)

That’s all I can think of for now and I’m sure this list is not exhaustive. Hopefully, I can update the blog as we make decisions about these things.

Jen