July 2016 - The venture

March 21, 2017

So the 2nd of July we woke up for the last time in our (empty) house in Molenstede (aka Meulsté) and ventured into new waters.
In aftermath of the bombings @ Brussels airport on March 22, more strict security measures were still in place, so we left extra early to avoid any extra stress on top of the approaching goodbye.
About that goodbye at the airport ... pfff ... if we could have, we would have avoided that all together, but we understood that was not an option for our parents 😏.

Luckily everything went pretty smooth and everybody was able to hold their tears (that is in front of each other anyways 😓). The hardest part was the last (intense) hugs ... but once past customs everybody seemed just ready for our new adventure.

First we flow to Amsterdam and then, after a straight 9h flight, we arrived in Salt Lake City, our end destination, where we were welcomed by some of the Belgians already living there.

We picked up our huge American rental truck, checked in at the hotel (we decided to get one night of good sleep in the comfy bed of a hotel after having camped for a month in our house and after such a long flight, before moving into our new, again empty house) and drove to Anouchka & Loïc (one of the 'local' Belgian families) to pick up our 'survival kit' = the bare minimum to survive until the container with our furniture would arrive from Belgium. After having a beer and chips in the back of our truck on their driveway (yep, we sure felt very American 😎), we drove up to our new home to drop off the kit.

It was for our kids the first time to see the house 'life', so we were all pretty excited ... probably Geert and I even more than the kids ... what would they feel? would they like it? ... you know what they say about the first impression!!

They loved it! Oef 😅

There was a very pleasant surprise when entering our new home ... An & Kris, friends from Meulsté who moved to Michigan a year ago, passed by our place during their trip in Utah the day before we arrived, and left us a cooler full of beer (and soda's ... but let's be honest, we were especially thrilled about the beers here 😜) and some other small useful things to make a good start. It felt welcoming and great and special ... but such a pity we missed each other by 1 day!!

We started our first three weeks as we ended them in Belgium, without our furniture, sleeping on the ground, without a comfy couch ... hell, without anything comfy! To ease the pain, I quickly bought a TV, leading to these pretty sad pictures 😏

Up until today, I have to hear how ridiculously small that TV is, but hey, we did not come here to watch TV, right??

Willem, our youngest, appeared to be very inventive in finding original, according to him more comfortable places to relax 😂

After a few days Geert already started his new job and a lot of things needed to be arranged: getting the house utilities (like gas, electricity, water) on our name, getting American phone numbers, buying cars, getting socials security numbers, our Utah driver licence and plates, insurances, ... during all of which we had to deal often with a counteracting American bureaucracy.
So when our furniture finally arrived, we were ready for a break! We left the boxes for what they were and made a trip to the national park 'Arches' and the state park 'Canyon Lands' in the South of Utah (more about this later under Trips & Tips in this blog) before we started unpacking and making our new house our home. Important to get your priorities right in life!