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We sold our house, our cars, and most of our furniture.

I couldn’t leave behind a puzzle that I wanted to do with the kids at our rental house in Southern France. It’s somewhere in a suitcase below.

Turns out, when packing to move abroad for a year, from beaches to mountains, across many different time zones, cultures, and climates, it’s hard to be completely logical.

A Year Abroad

And a year abroad is what we’re doing! We will travel around Europe and homeschool in the fall. In January 2026, we will settle somewhere in France where the kids will attend a French school.

It’s a big wild adventure that we have talked about for years. And it snowballed quickly.

When we decided to take the trip, we realized we were also ready to move into a different house in Kansas City. So we sold the house. We had a 12-year-old car. So we sold the car. We had a home buyer who needed furniture. So we sold her most of our furniture.

Honestly, it was far too much to cram into the last 6 weeks of summer. But we did it anyway. And we are thriving.

But the suitcases.

Packing everything we needed for the fall into 5 big and 5 small suitcases was ridiculous. We had to include clothes for a beach week in North Carolina, Christmas activities in Florence, Italy, and all the seasons and places in between, all of my kitchen knives, homeschool supplies for three kids, a projector for movie nights, and one pair of heels that I probably won’t wear.

Inquiring Chef - > Substack

This is something new, so thanks for checking it out!

I have written a recipe newsletter since 2010. But collectively as food bloggers we’ve come a long way (and endured a lot of jokes) from our early blogs filled with long personal narratives with the occasional recipe.

InquiringChef.com isn’t changing. New and archived recipes will always live there and will always be free.

But if you’ve been around for a bit, you might remember that I started the food blog as a way to share stories about my life in Thailand. I love writing about life abroad almost as much as I love writing about food.

And now that our family is traveling abroad again, my food blog is not the place for those stories. Substack is a smaller, more personal platform where these stories can live. I hope you’ll subscribe and follow along.

How to Move to France

The very first step in our journey abroad was to fly to Washington, D.C. and apply with the French consulate for long-stay visas. This. was. a. journey. I’ll share all about it in an email later this week!

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