Throwing Caution to the Wind
Deciding to go all in on a dream
If you know me, you know I’m like a dog with a bone once I land on something I want to do. When I commit to a project, I devote myself to it wholeheartedly and see it through.
So when I told my husband I was sure I wanted to move, he knew better than anyone else that we were moving.
Portugal was briefly on our “move abroad” possibilities list, but after reading about the steps we’d need to take, what Portugal offered, and what it would take to learn the language, I started sizing up Spain. The more research I did, the more the puzzle pieces fit together. And then I got down to business.
I first set up a giant Trello board because this would be a series of steps to check off. Because we had a ton of questions about how to start, I started searching YouTube for information. Eventually, I found James Blick’s channel and quickly discovered he hosts a “Move to Spain Masterclass.” James is kind of the OG of this space, although more courses are available today than when I started down this road in 2023.
I signed up for the masterclass, which was hugely beneficial in outlining exactly what a move to Spain could (should?) look like. One of the things James encourages people to do is make a scouting trip. With the kids’ passports and my credit card points ready, I booked the trip for our school fall break in October 2023. We would spend a week traveling up and down the Mediterranean coast, exploring Alicante, Altea, Murcia, Cartagena, and Barcelona. It was a lot of travel for just 10 days, but we had limited time and needed to visit to determine if Spain could work for us.
During our scouting trip, we visited two international schools: one American school focused on an American education style and the other a more traditional international school format with British influence. Interestingly, both school directors had spent a lot of time in the U.S. and understood the system we were coming from.
We walked away from that trip with information overload, but we had two big concerns:
Would healthcare and transportation be readily available in a smaller city like Altea? What about healthcare and a community we could connect with?
With Murcia’s desert-like climate, could we adjust to the heat? Did we want to live in a desert climate?
With those questions in mind, neither city felt right. Unfortunately, they were our frontrunners. I fell in love with Cartagena with its Roman ruins and cobblestone streets, but the limited number of international schools prevented it from making the list of finalists.
We talked about it in the months following our trip, and while Valencia had been on our list of cities to visit, we’d marked it off, thinking it would be too large. My husband preferred something smaller and less busy, but the more we talked, the more it looked like Valencia could check all the boxes.
As January 2024 approached, we had to start making some decisions and finalize plans if we wanted to complete this move by the end of 2024.