Sep 1, 2008
A Dream Realized
It was January, and Eric and I had been married for three months. It was perhaps the sixth time Eric and I had had the exact conversation.
“I want to go somewhere cool,” he said. “I want to live abroad.”
Perhaps sick of talking about it and ready to grab life by the horns, so to speak, I said that if we were ever going to make it happen, we’d just have to set a date and stick with it. Dates make things real.
“How about six months from now?” I said.
“OK.”
Then we laid there for about ten minutes, staring at each other.
“OK.”
At that time, we planned to go to Denmark where our dear friends Erika and Morten live. We spent the next month or so researching the immigration laws and applying for jobs upon jobs, which I was getting rejected from at an alarming rate. As we moved ahead in time, in the past nine months we dealt with a bit of a detour to our plan, where we planned on doing something totally different that turned out not to be the best idea we’d ever had, and we’ve dealt with watching as the balances in our investment accounts plunged right alongside the U.S. economy. Europe was no longer reasonable as a long-term assignment unless we had a job lined up, and neither of us had a job lined up.
Then Argentina entered the scene. It’s been a country we’ve both wanted to visit, and in what I call “Stealing a play from the Emily Gray playbook,” we decided that it’s the best place for us right now, at this point in our lives.
As a freelance travel writer, I’ll be able to learn all about a new place and write all about it as I try to expand my work. As IT-man extraordinare, Eric will certainly have a handful of projects in short order. If anyone needs a web developer or a great IT guy, even remotely from far away, just let us know.
It seems enormously surreal that Eric and I are sitting now, on Labor Day, in my parents’ living room, while all of our stuff sits 20 feet away in their garage and the apartment we adored back in Aberdeen is setting empty and clean. The even more surreal fact is that at 6:50 a.m. on Friday, we’ll be taking off on the first leg of our 21-hour airborne journey to our new home.
None of it seems real, and none of it seems feasible. Although June came and went without any departure from us, it’s only been nine months since that conversation, and we’re doing it. I think we did fairly well, and we both can’t wait for whatever it is that’s right around the corner.
