The end of one era, and the start of another

This post is a rather long read because so much happened between December 2025 and early March 2026. Many people have expressed an interest in how we made this transition, so I have tried to balance recounting the details with keeping it interesting and readable. It has only taken me four months to finish; hopefully, it won’t take you quite as long to read it!

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The first part of this year was a surreal blend of savoring our final days as members of the tightly-knit community of RVers while simultaneously managing the dizzying logistics of permanently relocating to another country. This wasn’t just a move–it was more like the end of one era and the start of an entirely new one. Just like we did almost ten years ago when we became full-time nomads, we were preparing to embrace not only a new home in unfamiliar surroundings, but also a completely new lifestyle to go with it.

It was thrilling, stimulating, challenging, and occasionally terrifying—and sometimes all three at once.

Getting our Italian visas (part 1)

Americans who plan to stay in Italy for more than 90 days need some form of long-term residency visa. Getting those visas was the longest and most complex part of our move.

We originally thought we would get Italy’s so-called “retiree visa”, formally known as the Elective Residency Visa or ERV. But last summer, we learned that we probably would not qualify for the ERV. So instead, we pursued Italy’s Investor Visa, which the country grants in exchange for investing in an Italian company. I would get the investor visa, and then Cheryl could piggyback on my visa by applying for a “family reunification visa”. We hired Smart Move Italy (SMI), a boutique consulting agency based in Florence, to manage the visa process for us and to help us with all the additional steps required once we arrived in Italy to establish our residency. Looking back on the process, I can’t imagine attempting it without experienced professional help.

We spent July through November of 2025, while we were on the road in our RV, gathering the documents required to apply for our visas: federal and state criminal background checks, a court-certified Italian translation of our marriage certificate, apostilles (official international legalizations) of many of the legal documents, a curriculum vitae detailing my professional and investment experience, many months of bank statements, a bank letter certifying compliance with the European Union’s anti-money laundering regulations, and more.

During this same time period, we also selected the “innovative Italian startup” we would invest in. We were fortunate to quickly connect through networking with a very promising, nearly five-year-old company, LifeGate Way. After some due diligence on my own, an in-depth video call with the two co-founders, and then an in-person visit with them in Milan in October, we felt confident in our choice.

Finally, before we could submit our visa paperwork, we had to commit to a city where we would live for at least our first few months in Italy. By mid-November, we had decided to put down our roots in Lecco in northern Lombardy. And with that last piece of the puzzle in place, SMI applied to the Italian government for a nulla osta, the clearance to issue my visa, just before Thanksgiving.

Fun with our RVing friends

While we waited for my nulla osta, we spent Thanksgiving with family in California, and then parked our fifth-wheel trailer on our lot at the SKP Saguaro Co-op in Benson, Arizona, for the last time on December 9. (That was the first of many “we’re doing this for the last time” moments.) We needed to be stationary for a while so that we could focus all our energies on our move. But being at Saguaro also gave us the chance to spend quality time with many of our closest RVing friends at park events, at trivia nights in town, at meals at local restaurants, and at more intimate happy hours and other private gatherings. This year, we even held a little Hanukkah celebration on our lot and introduced our friends to the game of dreidel. (Click on a photo below to view all the images with captions.)

Getting our Italian visas (part 2)

We received my nulla osta on December 24th, just before the Italian government offices closed for two weeks for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. The next step was to apply for my visa in person at the Consulate General of Italy in Miami, Florida (because we’re Florida residents). One of the items I had to be prepared to show at the application appointment was an airline ticket to Italy. We booked our one-way flight to Milan via London for March 16. We finally had a move date to work toward…and we almost made it!

I flew from Tucson to Miami on the evening of January 12, had my 15-minute appointment at the Consulate the next morning, left my passport with them for processing, and flew back to Tucson that evening. A week later, I received my passport in the mail with my shiny new Italian visa glued into it.

Next, we began the process of obtaining Cheryl’s family reunification visa by applying for a nulla osta for her. Unlike the nulla osta for the investor visa, which is issued by a national committee established for that specific purpose, nulla ostas for family visas are issued by the province where you’ll reside—Lecco, in our case. Once we had her nulla osta, Cheryl would need an in-person appointment at the Miami Consulate to apply for her visa, just like I had.

Nulla ostas for spouses of investor visa holders are typically issued in about two weeks. But three weeks went by, then four, and SMI had been unable to get an update from the Lecco immigration office. After five weeks, they were finally able to talk to someone there, only to learn that he did not know how to process Cheryl’s application. SMI connected him with his counterpart in another province who knew how to do it. And then…we continued to wait.

Finding an apartment in Lecco

While we were in the early stages of the visa process, we were also searching for a place to live. During our first visit to Lecco last November, we found what we thought was a near-ideal apartment. It was a two-bedroom, 1 1/2-bath “penthouse” (in other words, an attic conversion) with lovely exposed wood beams, in our price range and located on a quiet cobblestone street right in the middle of the city’s walkable historic center. With the help of Alexandra, a buyer and renter’s agent from SMI, we negotiated all the key terms, reached a verbal agreement with the owner’s agent, and departed Lecco fully expecting to have a signed lease within a few days for an 18-month term beginning in January.

Then things got weird.

First, the owner’s agent asked Alexandra to draft the lease. It was an unusual request–an owner/landlord almost always wants to control the terms of the lease–but she prepared a draft and sent it to the owner’s agent for her to review and complete. Then, the owner’s agent would simply disappear for days or weeks at a time, not responding to emails, chat messages or phone calls from Alexandra. From late November through most of January, she would resurface periodically with a brief message telling us that she had been very busy, or that she’d been ill and in the hospital, each time reassuring us that the apartment was definitely ours and promising to send back the lease. But it never arrived. We speculated that she and the owner could not produce some of the documentation that we needed to obtain a “certificate of suitability” that we had to file with the city, but we never did find out for sure.

By mid-January, still without a place to live, we were beginning to panic. We needed an address that wouldn’t change for about four months after we arrived, long enough to get through all the steps of the residency process. From the first time that the owner’s agent went incommunicado, we had been watching for other apartment listings, but with the holidays approaching, new listings had mostly dried up, and none of the few apartments that did get listed met our basic requirements. We began to explore either a multi-month rental through Airbnb (extremely expensive, with few to choose from for such a long term) or postponing our departure from the United States.

Finally, our luck changed just before the end of January. A real estate agent who a friend had referred us to messaged me that she had an apartment that might work for us. She sent us a few photos and the owner followed up with a few shaky videos. We weren’t sure it would be a good long-term solution, but with no other options available to us, we gave up on the original apartment and signed an 18-month lease for the new apartment without ever seeing it in person. (As it turned out, the apartment was much nicer than the impression we got from the photos and videos, and the couple that owns it are about our age and absolutely wonderful people…but that will be a subject for another post!)

Getting rid of (almost) all our “stuff”

Shortly after we parked our RV in Benson in December, we began sorting through all our stuff, deciding what we would take with us to Italy and what we would sell or donate before the move. We figured that this wouldn’t be too difficult…I mean, how much stuff could we have in our 400 square feet of living space, right?

Wrong. To our surprise, we discovered that we had a LOT. We had designed our New Horizons Majestic fifth wheel with plenty of storage space, and it was mostly full. Plus, we had some less-frequently used items in the casita on our RV lot. Even though it was much less than if we had been moving from a sticks-and-bricks house, it still seemed like an enormous amount to go through. More than once, I wondered aloud, “where did all this stuff come from??”

We cleared some working space in our casita and began sorting stuff into piles: one of things that would go to Italy, another of more valuable items that were worth selling individually on eBay and Facebook Marketplace, and a third pile of items for a yard sale or to donate.

We knew that it would cost about $130 to $180 per moving box to ship stuff to Italy, so we prioritized items that either would be difficult to obtain in Italy or would cost more to replace than to ship. Because both the voltage and frequency of AC power in Europe are different from those in the US, anything electrical that wasn’t dual-voltage capable–which included most of our kitchen appliances and power tools–was sold. We also sold or gave away anything related to RVing, as well as most of our outdoor gear (propane grill, fire pit, camping chairs, and so on). A few things that we would have liked to have brought, like our nearly-new compact e-bikes, were simply too expensive to be worth shipping. And then there were the things that we’d stored “to sell someday,” like a box of silver coins, some antique spoons that were my mother’s, dozens of Scouting patches and other collectibles, a Lladro figurine, and some comic books from Cheryl’s childhood.

All in all, between December 2025 and almost the moment we flew to Dallas in March, we sold about 80 items on eBay, another 25 larger items through Facebook Marketplace, and about 30 items directly to friends or other buyers. For a while, I felt like I was managing one of our old eBay drop-off stores again. Photographing and listing items, packing and shipping paid orders, and responding to online inquiries was almost a full-time job. But the extra effort netted us almost $10,000, which we could later use in Italy to re-purchase the things we’d need to replace.

As busy as we were, Cheryl still managed to carve out a few days in early February for a long-planned girls’ weekend in Tucson with some of her closest friends, who flew in from DFW and Denver for the event.

Selling our RV and truck

We listed our New Horizons Majestic fifth wheel trailer and Ford F-450 Platinum pickup truck for sale in mid-January. At that point, our biggest concern was that they might sell quickly, leaving us without a place to live while we prepared to move. But we we were disappointed to receive only two serious inquiries. The first was a couple that already owned an older Majestic. They drove to Benson from Yuma in mid-January and spent several hours looking over our RV. At the time, they said they were very interested, but they ultimately declined. A few weeks passed with no more inquiries, and we went from being worried about an early sale to panicking that we wouldn’t find a buyer at all before we were due to move. We began considering having the trailer towed to Kansas to put on consignment with New Horizons, which would have resulted in us taking a significant hit on the net sales price after their commission. Finally, though, in mid-February Frank and Michelle, a lovely couple from New Jersey, contacted us and we negotiated and signed a purchase agreement with them. They would pick up the trailer in early March, just a couple of days before we were ready to leave Arizona. Perfect!

With the RV under contract–so that we knew we would not need to move it again ourselves–we were now able to sell the pricey heavy-duty fifth-wheel hitch that we had used to tow our trailer. We found another New Horizons owner in Kentucky who was willing to purchase it. Getting it to him involved wrestling its 300 pounds of steel onto a shipping pallet, bolting it down, stretch-wrapping it, and taking it to a motor freight terminal in Tucson. I was just glad not to have to give it away.

We had even fewer serious inquiries on our truck than we did on the trailer. Ultimately, we ended up getting a reasonably good purchase offer from an auto dealer in Tucson. It wasn’t quite as much as we would have received in a private sale, but with time running out before our departure, it was the best option. We were fortunate that Paul and Vicki, some of our good RVing friends who also have a lot at SKP Saguaro, were on a six-month international trip without their RV, and they offered us the use of their Ford F-350 for the last couple of weeks we were in the park.

Packing and moving

As crazy as the preceding three months had been, the pace became even more insane in our last 12 days in Benson. We had to pack the rest of our belongings, move out of the RV and casita, and prepare to fly to DFW on March 7 for a week of final visits with our physicians and goodbyes with our friends before flying to Italy on March 16.

There was very little wiggle room in the schedule, and as always seems to happen, the amount of work to do expanded to take more time than what we had available. And remember, Cheryl still did not have her visa, so while we were sorting and packing, we were also working through contingency plans. Between the workload and the stress, we were sleeping only four to five hours a night, which didn’t help things. It was not a pleasant time.

Somehow, we managed to get through all our stuff so that we could hold a moving sale on our lot on February 28. Early that morning, many of our friends helped us haul a mind-blowing amount of stuff out of the casita and set it out on a bunch of borrowed tables by 9 am. The folks at our co-op park love a good yard sale; by mid-afternoon, we had sold about 80% of the items. We donated what was left to the park’s yard sale that will be held next fall.

Now we had to get serious about packing. We would be sending our boxes by air freight. The shipping company gave us several pages of detailed rules on what could and could not be shipped–no liquids, gels, or pastes; no knives of any kind (not even butter knives!); no prescription or OTC medications; nothing potentially flammable–and how it all had to be packed. So we had to carefully separate the forbidden items to go into our checked luggage, along with whatever we thought we might need for our time in Dallas and the few days in Italy before our boxes would arrive. At the same time, we needed to balance out the weight and sizes of our boxes to keep the shipping cost as low as possible. It was quite the logistics project.

On the morning of March 4, the RV buyer, Frank, arrived after a three-day drive from New Jersey. He and I went to a bank in Tucson to close the sale while Cheryl moved the last of our stuff out of the RV into the casita so that the RV could be cleaned. With the papers signed and the money transferred, I spent the rest of the afternoon and evening teaching Frank everything I could think of about the rig’s systems.

By that evening, the inside of our home looked fresh and ready for its new owners. Frank spent the night in the RV, and we decamped to the Comfort Inn in Benson.

The next morning, March 5, we continued Frank’s orientation to the Majestic. Cheryl mostly took over at this point, walking Frank through her detailed closing-up checklist to get everything secured and ready for travel. After that, we hitched Frank’s truck to the RV, and watched our beautiful home on wheels drive away for the last time.

We spent the remainder of that day unexpectedly rearranging our travel plans (more on that in just a moment) and continuing to pack boxes in the casita. On March 6, we completed our packing and enjoyed an afternoon goodbye party with many of our Escapees friends at the Old Benson Ice Cream Stop. We could not have finished all this without their help!

There was one major task remaining: to complete the shipping order and customs manifest online. We could not start that process until we knew exactly how many boxes we had to ship, along with the dimensions and weight of each box. And we had been warned that any inaccuracies in the customs manifest could result in our shipment being delayed or, even worse, returned to Benson after we had already left. So we worked in the casita until the wee hours of the next morning, entering more than 400 individual line items into the shipper’s website, each with a quantity, description, and customs value. Around 1:00 am, we finally drove back to the hotel for our last night in Benson.

Getting our Italian visas (part 3)

As of Monday, March 2–six weeks after we had applied for Cheryl’s nulla osta and 13 days before our planned departure to Italy–we still didn’t have the clearance that would allow her to get her visa. SMI advised that they didn’t think it would happen in time, so we developed a backup plan that would have had Cheryl enter Italy as a tourist, only to return from Italy to Miami a few weeks later to get her visa. She would then have had to wait about a week in Miami before going back to Italy. This approach would slightly complicate the rest of our residency process, but SMI assured us that they could make it work.

But to everyone’s surprise, on Thursday, March 5–literally while we were in the middle of helping Frank hitch up the RV–we finally received Cheryl’s nulla osta. Our relief was tempered by the realization that it would be nearly impossible for her to get her visa before our planned March 16 departure to Italy. We had two choices: either depart as planned and have her return to Miami for her visa appointment in a couple of weeks, or delay our flight to Italy. We quickly decided that delaying our departure made the most sense.

So as soon as Frank pulled away in the RV, we began working on revising our schedule. Because we were now homeless, we decided to fly to Dallas as planned and then have Cheryl travel to Miami from there for her visa appointment. Then she would return to Dallas, and we’d wait there for her passport and visa to be returned from the Consulate.

The earliest appointment we could get at the Consulate was on Friday, March 13, and we knew it would take about a week to get her passport back after the appointment, so we decided to delay our departure to Italy until Sunday, March 22.

We then spent the rest of that Thursday changing our reservation at the hotel in Plano, our flights from DFW to Milan, the Airbnb in Lecco where we planned to spend our first couple of nights until we could get into our apartment, the meeting date with the apartment owner and her agent, the shipping date for our boxes (so they wouldn’t arrive in Italy before we did), the surrender date for our co-op lot (because our boxes would still be in the casita), and a couple of Cheryl’s doctor appointments that she’d miss while being in Miami. We also had to quickly book a round-trip flight and hotel for her in Miami. Fortunately, after a few frantic hours in front of the computer and on the phone, and only a little swearing, all the pieces of our revised schedule were in place.

One complication of that change that we didn’t foresee was that we would not be able to label all our boxes before we left Benson. The shipping labels and customs manifests had to be printed within 10 days of the scheduled shipping date, and because we had to delay the pick-up, we were still outside that window. Once again, some of our good friends agreed to help us out: I emailed a PDF file of the documents to them from Plano, and they printed out all the labels and forms and affixed them in clear pockets to the boxes, readying them for pickup a week or so later.

Goodbye to Benson and the SKP Saguaro Co-op

After a few hours of sleep, we checked out of our hotel on the morning of Saturday, March 7, and returned to SKP Saguaro for the last time. We gassed up and returned the truck we’d been borrowing, sealed up all the boxes (a project in itself, because they had to be taped in a certain way), straightened up and swept out the casita, and turned in our keys to the office. Then it was time for a few last tearful goodbyes with our closest friends, and a ride with Jesse and Amanda to the Tucson airport for our flight to DFW and the start of our journey to our new life in Italy.

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If you’ve made it all the way to the end, thanks for reading! In the next post–which hopefully will not take another four months–I’ll tell you about our time in Dallas and our early days in Italy.