Barring more COVID madness we’ll leave Canada on September 1st of this year. Buying the tickets and booking temporary accommodation in France has hopefully sealed the deal.
The challenge now is figuring out the whole visa question. We’ve eventually figured out that we need a VLS-TS visa - a long term visitor’s visa that also serves as a residency permit. The challenge now is to figure out how to do some paid work on the side while living there. Visitor visas usually prohibit that activity.
The journey to this point has been long and arduous. The French visa web site has a lot of information but invariably stops short just where you need one more thing. Everything implies that we can do this but there are still some things we need to find out.
We’ve talked to two different avocats, both of whom demanded money in advance, and both of whom didn’t feel like a good fit. After much searching we’ve hired Mon Ami Andy, in Nice, to prepare our visa application. We’ve been assured that our visa will be in hand by sometime in July, but still it’s nerve-wracking to be selling the house in North Vancouver with no guarantee that France will let us in.
I mean, I’m not really worried, but it will be a relief to be past this last giant hurdle.
At the same time that we’re working on visa prep we’ve been doing a massive home renovation prior to listing, have started purging tons of dusty old stuff, and are moving large part of our life into storage lockers for real estate viewings.
And of course we’re now into the cycle of “bring it along” or “sell or give away”? When you’re paying to have things packed and shipped by container transport every pound and every cubic foot counts.