Follow your dream … even if you end up in Tarzo at night, cold and craving a toilet
How to make the jump from a safe, known and predictable life with house, garden and puppy into a life as digital nomads in Italy with a 70 kg English Mastiff. Even if you are turning sixty too soon.
It was dark, sometime after eight in the evening, when our two cars arrived in Tarzo, some 81 km north of Venice, Italy.
Although the streetlights were on and lights around the local church also, the left side of street, Via Roma, stood in the shadows. All shops except the two bars on the square were closed. The shutters in front of the small supermarket were down, like a fortress sealed for the night.
If we weren’t so tired after our 657 km drive, we probably would have thought it lovely and exotic. But we had more immediate concerns. Our Apple Map and the Volvo’s navigation system couldn’t locate the address of the house, we had rented for the next two months, April and May. Somehow the street Vicolo Speranza 10 in Tarzo didn’t exist in their mapped universe (in Google Map it does, we found out later).
What to do now?
Your dad only got to be 64
Somehow, we never considered that we might stand here in the dark and northern Italian kold, when we first dreamed up this idea of getting rid of most processions and relocating to Italy with only the dog and whatever that fits in our cars. It’s more than you might think as it turns out: my wife Zoe is really good at Tetris.
And why did we, a more than middle-aged couple, ever think of that of all things? I guess that most people in our age like us have more than enough to do with the daily chores, work, cleaning, shopping, cooking, inviting friends, adoring the kids and grandkids and … well, basically just settling down in the path that life seems to have taken. And somehow the hours, days, weeks, months and years pass by faster and faster (the speed seem to pick up all the time, doesn’t it?).
As everything in life, time is the important part. I am turning 60 this July. And my wife, Zoe, is also moving in that direction. Until recently we, a Danish-German couple, were living in the north of Germany, in the city of Eutin in Schleswig-Holstein, with Tante Emma (Tante means aunt), our English Mastiff.
We always had a dream, well of traveling, when we someday were to retire. Well… that is not the whole truth to be honest. Somehow without noticing, we stopped talking about the dreams. Work, deadlines, and the daily routines pushed them back in the picture, till they became something fuzzy and out of focus resting only in the very background of our minds.
Maybe part of it had to do with the arrival of the first grandkids and the first calls for help from stressed-out family members: please-come-I-can’t-deal-with-this-in-the-middle-of-smth-and-smth-else-and-I-hate-my-life.
Or maybe it was the neighborhood, where we had rented our house in Eutin, with neat rows of newly built redbrick houses, with young families living lives with baby strollers, kids in daycare and mortgages to be paid. A life that we had forsaken decades ago. A life so boring that some of the neighbors had developed an unpleasant habit of playing Stasi (the dreaded East German secret police) reporting on anybody who parked their car not exactly inside the white lines or cleared the sidewalk for snow before the designated time.
Maybe it all meshed together till one evening, when my wife said to me, as only a former German nurse can:
-You know, your dad and his dad before him, never got older than 64.
How to get rid of a sore conscience
The somber mood now set; a pregnant pause followed as she took another sip of her wine:
-Maybe we should think about traveling now? Who knows, maybe we won't have the energy to travel for very long, when you do retire.
And we started talking about the dreams again, because as always, her words made sense, didn't they? I mean, all our kids are, well sort of, grown up and getting on with their lives with work, relationships and raising kids. They make money, don’t they? And they should be old enough to take care of themselves, shouldn’t they?
And it’s not like we kicked them out of the nest and into a free fall, fly-or-die-situation. My wife, mostly, have been driving endless kilometers across Germany to paint new apartments or help with electricity and/or moving. Me, my bum knee and general uselessness are mostly along for being in the way or moving items from A to B and back again.
This part of the conversation lasted quite a while as parents always have a sore conscience when it comes to the kids. Could we really allow ourselves that freedom? I mean, there are always things, we as parents could have handled better or should have done earlier or not at all. Maybe it’s just me, but I still have a spreadsheet of that specific kinda regrets longer than my wife’s IKEA-shoppinglist. And let’s face it, in some cases kids also know how to push those very sore buttons with a rusty nail. Our talks went back and forth, before we decided to go for it.
The practical stuff, however, were a lot easier to deal with:
I don't have to turn up at an office everyday for endless meetings, stacks of HR-guidelines (a HR-word for regulations) and poor coffee. I am a freelance journalist and actually only need a working phone line and internet connection to serve most of my customers in Germany and Denmark (and my coffee is better). Somehow COVID also made it more normal or at least accepted to work far away from where the customers, partners, coworkers and/or bosses have their desks. And if I really show up in person for interviews, meetings or just with the need to show my tattered colors in person, discount airlines also need a reason to live.
When it comes to my wife, she stopped working some years back. And Tante Emma, almost two years old and a little less than 80 kg (a little more than 176 lb) at the outset of this journey, is happy as long as she has her toys, food and water plus a place to slobber and snore (loudly).
How to Tetris a life’s worth of furniture
So after a little more than a year of preparation, we got rid of the house, put our nicest stuff like my dad’s old armchair, my beer brewing equipment and a lot more in storage (we tetris’ed about 125 square meters of our stuff into 12 square meters and storage space: I did tell you, my wife is good at this stuff, didn’t I?) and gave or threw away the rest. Actually more stuff than you think, have just sat in a corner or on a loft unused for years, collecting cobwebs.
And the first of April we took off in two cars from Eutin to the little Italian town of Tarzo, a 1.344 km trip (or some 14 hours), where our journey into another life were to begin. It turns out that you can get a pretty good price on a couple of months in an Airbnb-house, if you rent it a year or so in advance.
Lesson one: you really need to plan ahead, if you want to do this.
In this space I will detail our trip, both our ups and downs: What to to and what certainly not do (ever), when you have decided to live like this. I hope that it might be of some use for you.
This almost brings me back to our arrival at Tarzo, where I still hadn’t had the good sense to check Google Maps for the exact location of our house.
Lesson two: check out the exact address of your destination, before you set out on a journey like this. It is not enough just to type in “Tarzo” and hope for the best, when you sort of and almost get there. Chances are that you will need the exact address, when you arrive. It is a rule of nature that you will arrive later and more tired than you thought at the outset.
After a tired and slightly irritated first search up and down the street, we weren’t much wiser.
After a couple of very long rings, Davide, who rented the house to us, answered the call. Between my total lack of Italian phrases and attempts at polite pleas for directions (somehow the Duolingo-app never covered that part in Italian) and his heavy accented and slightly broken English, he directed me to walk down the main road, Via Roma, while my Zoe retreated to her car for a little warmth. Tante Emma whimpered in the background wanting to get in on the action, and out from her confined space in the Volvo.
So no stress here. Not tired at all, no sir.
Davide, I could hear, had his wife guide him in English and his kids’ playing for background noise. He kept his cool so much better than me
Welcome to our new home for the next two months
The first time I missed the supermarket, he directed me to find. The second time it went a little better. I located the closed Maxi supermarket; I blindly had passed in my first attempt, and found the Vicolo Speranza, which turned out to be a little alley paved with first bricks and then broken cement followed by a path made of large flat stones in dirt and the grass.
In the dark the house didn’t look like the Airbnb-pictures. But that mattered less than getting the wife a toilet somewhere inside (success) and Tante Emma a place to be quiet and content (fat chance).
With a key and an open heavy wooden door into our new home for the next two months, I started to unload the cars for most of the stuff, we had crammed into them. Because who knows, if there were enough cleaning stuff and bedsheets in the houses we have rented along the way? And why not bring our own kitchen utensils with us? Not to mention towels and other necessities? Plus, all my gear for work like printer, scanner, 27’’ monitor, miles of cables etc.
Did I forget to mention that my wife is really good at Tetris?
One and half hour later, and quite a bit sweaty, I took a sip of water, before we took a walk in the very quiet streets of sleepy Tarzo, passing the local lighted church with the less than modest handle: Chiesa Parrocchiale della Purificatione della Beata Vergine di Tarzo. Tante Emma were more interested in the smells closer to the ground, while my wife found flowers with an intense scent here in the beginning of April, something we were still to wait for, if we had stayed in northern Germany.
We were finally here.
An apologetic side note
Now why am I writing this in English and not in Danish or German, you might wonder. The answer to that is we have family and friends on both sides of the German-Danish border and in a few other countries, so English seems the right choice (even though I am so very far from mastering this language well enough, for which I apologize in advance… especially where to position commas is a challenge).