Eastbound

After 11 years in US, I am moving to the UK with my family in the end of May 2010. We are all set with the logistics.

Flight Tickets: It's been a long time since I booked a one-way flight ticket and I was eagerly looking forward to do it. Alas, one way tickets from Boston to London was pricey - a direct flight could set us off by close to one grand per ticket. Sigh! Not agreeing to give up, I did a search with flexible return date (not many sites provided this option) and found round trip tickets for $620 per person. Now we have one week to decide whether we like it in the UK or not!

Moving stuff: Desis do not believe in traveling light. My wife decided to take only the "bare minimum personal belongings" with us - no furniture. Ours being a small move - we estimated 10 large boxes for a total of 500 pounds - it was not advantageous to reserve a container in ocean freight. So, we submitted a quote request from www.intlmovers.com and got bombarded with quotes from many companies. We ended up choosing a company based in Indiana. The smallest move they could move - which comes to about 20 large boxes - would cost us close to $1600, excluding the insurance. After many days of packing done over few weeks, we were done. The movers came last week, repacked everything into their boxes and took them. The final tally was 23 boxes (large, medium and small), totaling 920 pounds. It will be close to two months when they will be delivered to us. I don't want to think of the day these boxes will come home and demand a place. We plan to take five big suitcases with us to last the two months.

Selling stuff: We are renters - no house to sell, yay! The biggest item was a 1 year old minivan and started with that. I put an ad in craigslist and cars.com. Over a period of 3 weeks, I got at least 25 leads through craigslist, not one of them turned out to be a serious buyer. I got two leads through cars.com, both were serious and one of them bought it. Surprisingly, I did not lose money on the car - in fact, I broke even after considering the fees and taxes I paid.

Selling the household furniture took time - but they ultimately did. A lot of it was from Ikea. We ended up collecting $3000 for all the stuff we sold. Don't remind me what we spent on buying them.

We have never visited the UK. A lot of my friends and colleagues asked me if I am nervous. I am not. My wife is not either. My 10-month old doesn't know what is happening to him and is busy yapping away. We both did a big move from India to US, so this should be easy. Or so we think.