pmwilloughbyWelcome to the new Willnet.ws. I decided to make this site a journal of our new life in Tervuren, Belgium. We arrived here on March 11, 2022. But I have gotten ahead of myself. Lets start from the beginning. After retiring in 2014 we tried to settle down in Knoxville, TN. Though Julia was ready to move on after the first year I wanted to give it a while. Well that little while lasted seven years. I thought it would take a lot for me to take that leap to pull up stakes and move back to Europe on our own but then a lot happened. Not only was there a seismic shift in the political world but society seemed to come apart at the seams and that lead to a less than strong feeling of safety. Now this all may have been in my head but none the less I was shaken like I have never been before. I had my worries about the direction government was going but this was something that created a sense of urgency for me.
I began to research countries we could immigrate to. I had done this before but now there was an urgency to it. I looked at all the easy countries one could go to and obtain residency fairly easily but none of them fit us very well. The one place, Belgium, that was our dream had closed the possibility of moving there by shutting down their retirement visa for foreigners. So the hunt was on for an alternate destination. This was made much more difficult with the pandemic raging world wide. But finally France opened the door for a long stay visa that we could convert to permanent residency. I had always thought of living in the south of France so now was the time to do it. We completed the applications had the interview made the reservations and were off. We traveled to Aix en Provence, France on 2 October 2021 and were planning to settle there when I discovered Belgium had opened their retirement visas to foreigners again. Since we had been waiting for almost two years for that to happen I immediately started the application process. Once that was done we were on our way back to the USA to complete the application process and wait for the visas to be issued. We traveled to Atlanta GA on the 23 of November 2021 to turn in our dossiers to the Belgian Consulate. Then there was the wait. That was the hard part. Since our house was sold and all our stuff was in storage we decided to wait on the southern coast of North Carolina. We rented a condo in Caswell Beach located on Oak Island and settled in for the winter. Is was nice to be able to see the ocean from our window and take afternoon strolls on the beach. The sunsets were fabulous. We would stay there until the 10th of March even though our visas were approved on the 17th of January. So far the experience had been a good one. I will tell those in future posts.