The day after I signed the contract, Running Man (RM) and I packed up the car and headed north. I was flying out of Stuttgart, Germany, back to the States. Our trip took us again through western Austria and into Germany. RM and I talked about the house in Goce and about its potential for my B&B. It really seemed too good to be true. And as we drove through the northwestern part of Slovenia with its beautiful Austrian-influenced alpine farmhouses, I was more confident than ever that the Vipava Valley region was the perfect place to be -- close enough to all of this but more temperate, more Italian and Venetian, and right smack dab in the middle of wine country.
I was going back to Missouri to figure out how to finance my dream. RM was going back to France, then to Spain where he would work for a count and countess whom he'd worked for in the past. Although I didn't know for sure when I would be returning to Europe, he hoped I would be able to meet him in Spain at the end of his tour there. I couldn't even think about that right now.
When I signed that contract, I turned a corner. Unless I wanted to lose $13,000, I was leaving everything familiar and safe and heading into nothing familiar at all. I had a lot of time to think about that on my flight back to Atlanta. I could close my eyes and see what Goce 23 would look like after I carefully and lovingly reshaped it. But from time to time, my reverie would be interrupted by that other voice in my head that shouted, "Are you crazy?!" Perhaps I was.
My sister-in-law picked me up at the airport in Kansas City and I stayed with her and my brother that night. They were ecstatic as they looked through the photos I had downloaded to my laptop. Since they were the first Americans I had a chance to talk to for awhile, I had to ask them if they thought I was nuts. They both told me I wasn't crazy, I was brave. There's a very thin line between bravery and insanity. I'm convinced it requires a smattering of both to make this kind of move.
I was a long way from making the move -- about 98,000 Euros away, in fact. I had until the end of October to come up with the bulk of the money, but only until Monday to conjure up the down payment. It was Friday when I left Kansas City. The proverbial clock was ticking. I needed to get back to my temporary home in northeast Missouri to get a few more mature people to weigh in on the insanity issue. After all, my brother and sister-in-law weren't even quite 30 years old yet. They were still too young to have been tainted by disappointment and, well, reality. I hoped they could live out their entire lives that way.
I had another three hours to think on my drive back. I knew I needed to make sure I was pursuing this dream for all of the right reasons and none of the wrong ones. Was I just trying to run away? Did I just want to make sure I wouldn't have to run into the ex and someone else from time to time? Had I become so jaded that I needed to leave everything I'd ever known for a new world where I knew nothing? Faced with the reality of actually making such a bold move, I needed to make sure my motivations were pure and not reactionary. This wasn't the first time I had pondered these types of questions, but this was the most important time to make absolutely positively sure. Well, as sure as you can be about anything in this world.
I believe that when faced with life-altering decisions, you have to think with both your head and your heart. To think with only one or the other leaves the task incomplete. If I used only my head, I would have reasoned that my business was slow. My debt load high. I could never get a loan from a bank here for a property there, nor from a bank there without a job and a residence. I couldn't speak the language and it's an incredibly difficult one to learn. I could count the number of acquaintances I had there on one hand. And running off to Europe would never heal the scars I still carried with me, although they were fading. Well, you get the idea. Using only logic, the "cons" column was full and the "pros" column rather empty. I needed my heart to fill that one in. The first one was a biggie: My dream was to own a B&B and write. If I believed in my dream enough and worked hard enough, I could overcome all of the negatives. I just had to have faith.
Now, faith is something I definitely struggled with during the bad years of my marriage. But during the past few months, I had slowly regained a bit of it, perhaps without even realizing it. What was God's plan for me? It was apparently not what I had believed it to be. I needed to let go of what I thought my life was supposed to be about and instead of thinking and planning so hard, just take the time to close my eyes, raise my face to the warm sun and cool breeze, stretch out my arms and breathe deeply. You can't control most of what happens in your life. You can only control what you do with the priceless, albeit painful, things you learn along the way. Without a dream, life is pretty empty. I had existed dreamless for several years. Now, I had found a new dream and I needed faith again. The two go hand in hand.
I spent Friday and Saturday in a frenzy of figures. I pooled my tiny bank account, a client's payment, a couple of credit cards and even one of those checks from some payday loan place that was in my stack of mail when I returned. I didn't have time to get anything sold -- the Mercedes, jewelry, piano, etc. When Monday arrived, I checked the exchange rate. I was still $600 short. I was depressed but philosophical. If I couldn't put together the down payment, buying the house just wasn't meant to be. Pure and simple. But being philosophical didn't keep me from allowing a very good friend to lend me the shortfall until I did sell a few things.
On Monday morning, I wired the down payment from my bank to Mr. M.'s bank in Slovenia. I then called RM who had told me he would contact Zvonka to make sure everything had arrived as it should. One thing you can't control is the precise exchange rate when your U.S. Dollar hits a European bank. By the time mine hit Mr. M.'s account it was actually a few Euros shy of the full down payment amount. Not to worry, RM told me after speaking to Zvonka. Mr. M. said I could just put the difference in the final payment.
I was one critical step closer to my dream, and $13,000 and change deeper in debt.
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