…and it’s finally time to answer the call!

After what felt like an eternity (but was actually just four years) of talking about it and praying it would eventually happen, we are officially MOVING TO DISNEY!!!

This week my wife was offered a job that’s just five miles away from Disney Springs! She’ll be moving down there to start in 29 days!

Needless to say, we’re extremely excited! Despite talking about it here with you readers all these years, I still can hardly believe it’s happening!

We’re still reeling and a bit flustered since we were expecting the job search to take much longer. So we’re just at the very beginning of figuring out our next steps. But here are a few initial thoughts about all this.

My wife starts the job at the end of March. However, I’ll be remaining here in Tennessee for awhile longer. (Other than helping her move, of course.) My son doesn’t graduate high school until mid-May. Then we’ve got to sell our current house. So we won’t be fully moved until this summer.

If I thought house hunting was a chore, now I’ve added a hotel search and an apartment search to the mix! I’ve never lived in an apartment as an adult, so I’m not sure how long the application process is. Time to start some research. If we’re lucky, maybe we can skip the hotel and get her directly into an apartment.

One thing we were worried about in the job search was finding one in a good location for us. Disney is actually about 20-30 miles away from Orlando, and too many jobs she found were in the city or even further away in the suburbs on the opposite side of Orlando. Taking a job in those locations would mean either living further away than we wanted to keep her commute to work short, or living closer to the parks and making her spend a lot of time driving. Working west of Orlando means we don’t have to choose between two bad options when house hunting.

I mentioned in a previous post that our kids had decided they wanted to stay here. It was a choice I disagreed with but understood having gone through the same feelings before a move when I was younger. For my 21 year old daughter, her preparations have been relatively simple. Get a job, find some roommates, finish college. Done. For my high school aged son, things are more complicated. He doesn’t have his driver’s license yet, which means he can’t get a job, which means he can’t afford an apartment or any other necessities. Now that the move is imminent, he’s all but run out of time. So we made the difficult decision to tell him he’ll have to come with us. He’s not thrilled, but I hope he sees the logic behind it. And, as we told him, he can start getting ready to live on his own while in Florida, then move back to Tennessee soon enough.

My wife said one of the things she wants to do before she leaves is get her wedding ring resized so she can start wearing it again. (She doesn’t wear it often because it’s too big.) I thought it was a weird request, but hey, if it keeps the men away from her while I’m stuck 10 hours away in Tennessee, then let’s get it resized!

I’d have been delighted to go whenever it happened. But I admit I am happy with the timing. My wife turned 50 last year, I turn 50 this year, and we’re moving down during Disney 50th anniversary celebration. It feels like the perfect time to make a new start!

Thanks for following along with us on this journey. I’m so happy things have worked out the way we hoped they would. But it was never a sure thing. Sometimes the excitement and nervousness about our plan was overwhelming. I’m glad I had this blog as a sort of release valve to let off some of that energy by sharing my thoughts. And with everything that we now have to do to actually get ourselves down there, that excitement and nervousness is only going to ramp up!