The important thing, when faced with a blank sheet of paper, is to make it not blank anymore. Makes it less intimidating.

This is the story of how I took a year off from my life, uprooted my girls and dragged them 1/4 of the way around the world to look at what life is like being somewhere totally else. Filia Maior and Filia Minor will be in Italian schools -- their Italian will be significantly better than mine when it's all over. We'll be living in a town called Besozzola, Pellegrino Parmense (thus the title of the blog -- Pellegrin-a- Parmense means "A Female Foreigner in the area of Parma"). You can look at it on Google Earth. My house is the one at the other end of the hamlet from the house with the swimming pool. We're going to do a good bit of looking at Italy, but mostly we're just going to live in Italy. I've wanted to do this for a long time. Finances, emotional and physical health, and a good break point for everybody converged. And so on Thursday, July 19, at 6:25pm, we will board the plane headed for our adventure.

But that's not actually where the adventure began. More soon on the lead-up to The Great Migration.