Moving to Europe!
Sometime in the last... hmm... well sometime since the beginning of COVID Heather and I realized that we can basically live wherever we want. Neither of us have really had that kind of freedom (or at least not that we realized) ever before. We run a fully-remote company, we can work from anywhere that there's a good internet connection. Our kids, well, aren't really kids anymore, they're old enough to make decisions for themselves. So we started the journey of figuring out where we want to live.
The discussions didn't even start with "we can live anywhere", they started with "when we're free to live wherever we want, maybe Vermont would be nice". Somewhere along the way came the realization though that we don't really have to wait anymore. Around the same time we started exploring beyond Vermont.
Certainly the increasingly divisive and dysfunctional political climate in this country helped push us to look elsewhere.
With my super-analytical approach to things like this, I started doing research. World happiness index, quality of life index, life expectancy index, etc... There were disqualifying things too: Sweden: too cold, Greece: loved visiting, but wouldn't feel comfortable having to bribe officials to make living there happen, Australia: everything wants to kill you, etc... One country seemed to end up near the top of all of the lists, and didn't have any disqualifiers. The land of windmills and tulips, The Netherlands.
The more we learned about The Netherlands the more it felt like a good fit for us. A direct people who are known for just honestly giving their opinion rather than making you guess where you stand with them. They have a saying that I love, "God made the world, but the Dutch made the Netherlands". It speaks to how they've literally created land where there was once sea. They have walkable/bikeable cities, you can easily get around without owning a car. The more we learned the more we felt like the Dutch culture was a better fit for us than the US culture.
As time went on we started dreaming, and the dream started to look more and more possible. We started studying Dutch on Duolingo (we spreken nu een beetje Nederlands), and started to figure out what the steps were we needed to take. In September of 2021 we finally visited in-person. We toured a number of Dutch towns/cities and we loved every bit of it even more than we hoped. It really was the place we wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. We also found the city that we want to move to. Haarlem seems to be a good mix between a lot of our favorite features of all the places we visited.
So here we are... In the final stretch. We're working to sell everything we don't want to or can't bring with us, and planning to move in June. It's an exciting adventure. I hope to post plenty more about it as we go.