And now for the big announcement...
If you've read my blog for very long, you'll know that I really like to travel. I've been fortunate enough to travel most of the US, several parts of Mexico, Jamaica, Aruba, and England. It has been a lifelong goal of mine to experience living in a foreign country as a resident, and not just a tourist. Visiting some place for a couple of weeks is great and you can generally fit most of the tourist destinations in a trip like that, but I want to take a year and become a resident where daily life and customs are completely different than they are here in the US.
One problem with this whole idea has been that it costs a lot of money to live somewhere for a year. We'd have all our normal expenses here in the US, like house payments, car payments, insurance, utilities, etc., plus rent for a house over there with it's associated utilities. I figured I'd need to save up a year's worth of house payments to even start thinking about something like this.
We have been planning a move closer to Grand Rapids for about a year now and had decided to put our house up for sale in April. My brilliant wife had a great idea the other day.. she was asking how we were ever going to accomplish this goal of living in Europe, and I explained the usual obstacles to such a plan, and she pointed out that once we sell our house here in Michigan, our biggest obstacle to spending a year in Europe is removed. We planned to sell our house anyway, so why not move to Europe for a year before buying another property in Michigan? What a great idea! Why didn't I think of that?
Right now we're trying to decide exactly where we'd want to spend a year. I just loved London when we vacationed there a few years ago. I could easily live there. We're also thinking that it would be important that we be able to visit the rest of Europe, so London wouldn't necessarily be the best place from which to venture to other parts of Europe (extra travel time and expense of crossing the channel).
One of the things we enjoyed so much about London was being able to walk, ride bikes, or take the train literally everywhere we wanted to go. We'd want to do without a vehicle, so climate will be rather important since we don't want to be walking or riding in ice and snow part of the year. Also, availability of high speed internet is a must so I can continue to work. With my Vonage phone service I'll still have a local phone number and customers would not even have to know I was out of the country. My work hours would be a little odd, like 3pm-11pm, but I can handle that since I'm always up those hours anyway.
Since I know relatively little about Europe, we have quite a lot of research to do before starting our adventure. Our first step is to make a list of 10 candidate cities based on climate, availability of public transportation, availability of high speed internet, and just places we think would be fun from a cultural perspective.
I'll post the address of another website I'm putting together to track all of our research on this, but I don't have it done just yet. Feel free to post a comment and tell me what you think of our idea.
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