What happens when you decide to move your family overseas
Taking on a big family project with lots of uncertainty
I can’t remember the exact conversation, but it went something like this.
It must have been a weekend morning in the summer of 2021. Alana was in the dining room watching TV while Kelly and I were taking turns making coffee in the kitchen. Jonah was also sitting at the kitchen table playing games on his iPad, when Kelly said, “I was up all night because I kept thinking that if we’re going to live abroad it has to be next year.”
“Ok?” I said looking up.
Kelly continued, “Alana is getting booked with activities. This is the last year we can do this before it will be too much to leave her friends. Also, Alana will be starting middle school after fifth grade, and we can postpone that for a year.”
The first thing that came to my mind was that I didn’t know if I could manage the obligations I had at my company, Kelsus, while also living abroad, but I didn’t want to kill any momentum towards a dream that Kelly and I had had since we got married and lived for a year in Uruguay in 2008. We always wanted to do it again with kids, and if this was the year, this was the year. I’d figure it out.
“Let’s do it. We’ll figure it out,” I said.
But Kelly was way ahead of me. “I really want to go back to Uruguay. We’d have such a great support system there.”
“Uruguay? But I want to go to Spain,” I said. “If we go to South America, I can’t not live in Argentina with the rest of my company.” (They all live in Argentina because of a thing that happened at the end of our time in Uruguay.) “But I don’t want to live in Argentina because there’s no surf there.”
In truth I wanted to live somewhere new with better waves than Uruguay. For me, whether real or imagined, some huge part of this trip was about undoing the psychological damage that not living by the ocean and surfing every day does to me. My not-Uruguay stance wasn’t about appearances and the location of my teammates. “I’d live in Chile?” I said with a question in my voice.
Kelly reminded me of earthquakes, then told me that she didn’t want to live in Spain because that’s what everyone does. Uruguay is a secret that only we know about, Spain is for hordes of English speaking expats. But she conceded that South America could be problematic because their school year starts in February and ends in November or December.
This argument about where to go meant that we had skipped right past arguing about whether to go. We were doing this.
I told Kelly I’d make a board on Trello, which is a software program that makes it easy to visualize complex projects and assign tasks to people. We use it to manage software development projects at Kelsus.
I made cards on our Trello board like, “Research Peru?” “Research Punta del Este,” “Surf spots in Spain,” and “Update kids’ passports.”
Over the next several weeks, Kelly researched every school in Uruguay, every school in Spain, and more schools in other countries. Good surf doesn’t necessarily mean good education, and we wanted the best for Alana and Jonah. A perfect school would start in September and go through June. It would have small classes. It would support their learning quirks, and be mostly but not 100% in Spanish.
While Kelly was researching schools I researched waves. People on Twitter told me to live in San Sebastian. But, famous spots like Mundaka in Spain only work from November to April… not ideal. Kelly also discovered that kids in that region are required to learn Basque. That would be neat if they were already fluent in Spanish, but they weren’t. A third language would be too much.
Through our research the map got smaller. There were times when I agreed to live in Punta del Este and times where Kelly agreed to live in Spain. We talked about it every night often until Kelly would say, “I’m too tired to keep talking about this. Let’s watch TV.” Then we’d go to sleep, wake up, and keep talking about it.
In the end maybe because of my insistence, or maybe because of the realities of the upside down South American school year we agreed to go to Spain. My research on waves that worked year round pointed me to an area in the west coast of Spain called Galicia that no one ever talks about.
We looked at how close it is to Portugal and liked that. We saw that there is a local language called Galician but day-to-day on the street, younger people speak Spanish, and we liked that. Kelly found a cute Montessori school that we could imagine our kids at, and we liked that.
When we first decided to live abroad and didn’t know where we were going to go, it felt like there was a blurriness to life. Being unable to see into the future is hard. It feels very uncomfortable, because you want to work towards something but nothing you do feels like progress.
As soon as we settled on Galicia, and the city of Vigo in particular, we could see clearly. Now we could focus on questions like how to get a visa, how expensive it would be to live there, and whether to lease our house for a year or put it on AirBnB.
For me, this is when it started getting fun.
The decision had taken six weeks. It was now August 2021, the kids were asleep and fully unaware of what awaited them. We sunk into our couches and filled the Trello board with understandable, concrete tasks, then we queued up a show on Netflix, and broke the night’s chocolate bar in half—able to breath deeply for the first time in weeks.
—Jon