We promised before we started this trip that we would update this blog. The reason we gave was to keep everyone informed about our progress, adventures etc. The truth is it is a good way to make everybody we have left behind jealous ;)
We are now almost three weeks into the trip and this is the first post we've made. We have actually been having too much fun. It's now almost one in the morning, I am sitting in my cousins flat with Chris Rock extolling the virtues of strippers on the TV and my wife asleep next to me. I figured I would take this opportunity to at least start a post. How far I get before I get too bored / tired to continue, well, we will have to see.
Just in case some total stranger has found their way to this blog I should really introduce myself and explain what this is all about. My name is Seb Verghese. I am 36 years old and for the past 12 years have been working in IT for some large international financial institutions in the city of London. I have been married to Vlad for almost 4 years. Vlad is Slovak, but she has been living in London for the past eight years. We finally got to the point where we were tired of living to work, primarily to pay off the mountain of debt which never seemed to be diminishing, no matter how much I was earning. A plan developed whereby we were going to sell the house, using the equity to pay off all the debts, leaving a nice sizable chunk of money in the bank, and then using the rest to finance a trip around Europe for a few months. Travelling to Slovakia to spend some time with Vlad's family and perhaps showing me a bit more of the country other than the pubs, before finally returning to France and settling in Paris. 'Why Paris?' I hear you ask. Apart from the food, I have always been a francophile. I am one of the minority of English who speaks French passable enough to impress the French. I spent one of the best holidays of my life when I was nineteen, hitching through France on my own for two and a half months. I experienced the most amazing generosity from the French, the details of which I may come to later, but in the meantime back to the trip....
The other important detail was our five year old black Labrador, "Prince" to everybody else, "Shithead" to me and my wife depending on what he has done now. Non dog owners do not understand what an integral part of your family a dog can become. For us the idea of taking the trip and not taking Prince was just not an option. So we decided that rather than messing about with finding a comprehensive list of hotels and guest houses that accept dogs, or trying to stop our supposedly intelligent canine running through the wall of a tent, travelling around in a motor home may present a workable option.
So with the basics of our plan worked out Vlad quit her job with a design consultancy last January to concentrate on finishing her Chartered Institute of Marketing qualification, and study French at the Institut Francais for six months. Then we got some news which changed our plans somewhat. One of my cousins in the States was getting married. This gave me the perfect excuse to finally twist Vlad's arm into visiting the US. We agreed that as a compromise we would go to the wedding in Baltimore, then hire a car and travel up the North East side of the country, visiting my friends and relations along the way. We would leave the dog with our dogwalker for this part of the holiday. We return to the UK on the 5th July, after what I would anticipate to be raucous celebrations for the 4th July, to pick up the motor home and the dog, and then set off on the original trip across Europe.
I continued working at Calyon (don't worry if you've never heard of it, it's actually a large virtually unknown investment bank created by the merger of two very well known large French banks, Credit Agricole and Credit Lyonnais) until we had a firm offer on the house, then I quit too. Getting an offer on the house for the asking price proved to be surprisingly simple. We have previously had bad experiences with estate agents. They seem to expect vast amounts of money for doing little or no work. I managed to find an on-line agent called housenetwork.co.uk, (no apology for the shameless plug here, these guys were really good). For a few of 199 they sent somebody round to the house to take the photographs of the house. Then they designed and built a website, including walk around tours, before advertising the property on the other large very well known property websites. I received an offer equal to the asking price within a week of the initial visit of the photographer.
The next part was not so simple. Although we had explicitly stated at the beginning of the process that we wanted to complete on the 11th June it was delayed by a few weeks causing us considerable stress and financial loss due to interest and missed payments. This delay was caused largely by the managing company for our development, Peverel OM. If anybody out there is thinking of buying a new home and these guys are the landowners or managing agents then watch out. They are a bunch of scumbags. A large part of it is that they are incredibly incompetent, but they also really don't give a shit. They took three weeks to provide the initial information requested by the buyer, even though it must have been on file somewhere from when I bought the place, after demanding 130 quid for the privilige. They then took a week to answer the subsequent questions raised. My own solicitor didn't exactly help much either, I am not sure if they fully understand the concept of "urgent".
The end result of all this was that we left for the most expensive part of the trip with limited finances and limited access to credit. Oh well, C'est la vie.
