A travel video on Croatia

http://youtu.be/Uig_y7Laows
I can't believe we will be here in a month and a half from now.

Our Departure Date is Rapidly Approaching

The end of the school year and our departure date is rapidly approaching.  My school year ends June 13^th while Katie’s ends June 20^th.  Her school is under a school improvement grant, which means they have longer school days and an extended school year.  During that week, I will be at home getting the rest of the house packed up.  We’ll be putting our stuff in storage or selling it at a yard sale.

            The bad news is we didn’t get a buyer for our house. However the good news is that we did find a renter, which is a big load off our shoulders. Our renter is a teacher/friend of Katie’s at her school. She will be moving in July 1^st.

            So during the last couple weeks of June, we are hoping to get a couple of house projects done before we leave the country like: paint the inside and outside of the garage, our front porch, redo the floor in the laundry room, cleanout the sprinkler filters, shampoo the carpets, and on and on.  If we end up staying in Zagreb, each summer we are hoping to come back to Yakima to do a couple of week long projects on the house such as repainting or roofing. Some projects we might contract out but some we might do ourselves. However it will be nice to oversee the process and make sure the job gets done correctly while visiting friends in Yakima.

            Enough about logistics and boring stuff…we bought a CAR. We purchased the car from the principal that was moving back to the states.  This works out best for the both of us. We would have had to rent a car for almost 2 months, and that would have been close to $2,000 with no long-term investment. We couldn’t buy a car right away because we need to establish residency and that can take up to 2 months. Importing our car from the USA would have cost $3,000 and an additional tax of 40% of the value of our car. We bought the car for $5,000 interest free because the school is giving us the loan. The car has only has 50,000 miles on it.  We got a great deal and it works out because we get to use the car right when we get there. The car will still be in our principal’s name until we establish residency. We plan on putting a lot of miles onto that car J.