CALL ME: 18 DAYS LEFT

Not many people understand all the details and loose ends that must be tied before picking up and moving to another country.For instance, how we’d choose to receive mail and packages from online shopping purchases. Thankfully there are services like usabox.com that take care of matters like that, willing to ship all our mail to the Ecuadorian jungle for a nominal fee. Of course then we had to fill out and notarize a change-of-address form since it’s an international forwarding company, not just a regular move. Then there’s the matter of education for our daughter (home school, online private school, or public school in a language she‘s not fluent in?), getting medical records updated, insurance paid for a car we’ll no longer drive, tags taken to the DMV for the other car we sold, ordering shoes from Zappos.com since shoes are hard to find in our sizes down there, vaccinating the dogs, …the list is endless! 


Then I remembered another detail yet to be hammered out--getting our T-Mobile cell phone service canceled. Just for free publicity, I must give due praise where it belongs; T-Mobile has far surpassed any of our other carriers, and we've had them all. (Verizon was by far the worst!) The customer service was so exceptional that I feel like I could call them just to say hey. So it’s going to be a bit like breaking  up a romantic relationship next week when I have to call and cancel. 


But that left me to ponder how we’ll keep in touch with friends and family once we move. So I did the research. I filtered it down to the following contestants: MagicJack, Ooma, Nettalk, Vonage and Skype- all VOIP services that would allow us to call the States for 2 cents a minute or less. Without quoting the thousands of reviews I read of each one, I’ll cut to the chase: I chose Skype. I was already a member of the free plan in which you can call and video chat with anyone who also has Skype for free. But I was annoyed that whoever I was calling would have to have their PC up and running and know exactly when I was going to call them, thus having to make prior arrangements just for a ten minute “What’s up?” call. So I went ahead and upgraded my membership. For $30 a YEAR we can call anyone in the US and Canada. My only complaint is that with this membership, I can’t receive calls unless I do the free PC to PC way. Skype has premium membership options, but not in my price range. So we’ll try it out for a year and see how it goes. Besides just $30, what's to lose?


 Being down to just 18 days left though, I’m a little stressed. So much to do still, including drive all the way to Atlanta next weekend to get our 12-IX visas. It will be a 14 hour round trip drive and hotel expense for something that should take less than 30 minutes. If I were to go into every detail of what it takes to make a major move like this, I would no doubt discourage you from ever doing the same. But in 18 days from now, we’ll be dipping our toes in the Napo river, shaking hands with curious capuchin monkeys, listening to parrot calls in the day and the jungle’s orchestra at night. We’ll meet new friends that will become part of our international family, share fresh tilapia cooked in a banana leaf with them and sit around a jungle campfire singing native songs with them. In 18 days our lives will be yet again forever changed and all the stress and confusion of which phone service we should have or which hiking boot I should order will be a thing of the distant past.