If you have already heard the answer to these questions, please feel free to skip this entry and wait for my next installment.  If you are one of the folks who has asked me (or Andrew) this question and we have said “How long  do you have…?”  please read on and I’ll attempt to answer.

Why?

Why would two reasonably sane (that’s debatable), self-employed adults with family roots and dear friends in the US, decide to pack up and move across the world?  Well, “why not?” has been the clear response we both come up with when asked.  We both thoroughly enjoy global travel, meeting new people, drinking in cultures different than our own, and we have always traded the opportunity of material acquisitions for travel experiences for ourselves and our kids.  We have raised three young adults who embrace travel, and we are blessed to have family and many friends who love to travel as much as we do (so we could count on visitors).  Technology has made the entire world  smaller and more accessible – we can do our work virtually and stay in touch with loved ones with relative ease compared to just 10 years ago.   Add to that a propensity to take educated risks and the need to always have some sort of challenge in our lives (masochists to an extent, it could be argued), this just made sense.  We knew that being tourists was not the same as becoming part of the fabric of daily life in a foreign country – that in and of itself being perhaps one of the biggest and most interesting challenges of all.  So, why not?

Why Now?

During our yearly summer pilgrimage to Camp Kesher last summer (a family camp I started over 13 years ago with my soul sister, Amy Gray), Andrew and I finally agreed that after nearly 26 years of Mercer Island suburbia it was about time to make good on our promise to each other to try living overseas.  We’d been talking about the concept for many years and we felt that the timing just wasn’t quite right – kids too little, business too young, Microsoft wouldn’t move us, etc.  And so we waited, and then we realized it really could be time.  Ari would graduate in 2012 and hopefully have a job and establish his adult life; Ruthie would have finished her first college year and hopefully be on her way to independence; Eitan would be in high school and perhaps amenable to an adventure (wild card, admittedly at the time);  Andrew’s business was established enough to ‘go virtual’; and I had begun to really lay solid free-lance consulting groundwork that likely could be done from almost anywhere as well.  So, we set sights on Summer/Fall 2012 to move somewhere – not here…not in the US.  We all – including extended family – generally were/are in good health going into this, and having a track record of real ups and downs in that regard, felt that there was no time like the present.  The stake in the ground was set.

 Why Barcelona?

I could take the cheap way out on this one and say “why not???” but that would be really mean, huh?  There was a pretty logical process we went through to settle on Catalonia’s seaside gem…

We didn’t just throw a dart at a world map and hit Spain and Barcelona – there were some specific criteria we settled on when trying to hone in on the destination for this odyssey:

• Better, warmer weather than Seattle (oh, big surprise there)
• Relatively easy transportation options out of the city/country to do business and visit family (Marshall Islands were out)
• Rich history and culture different than what we already knew, with lots to explore in arts, food, local color etc
• Perceived “fit” with the kind of personalities and cultural profile we have (we were looking for liberal, warm/open, relaxed versus regimented…)
• Proximity and ease of transportation to other countries and cultures.
• Relative safety  (high marks for gun controlled, non-police states not currently at war with neighbors).
• Good educational opportunities for Eitan as he would need to nearly complete (or complete)  high school wherever we landed.
• Bonus points were definitely factored in for at least one of us having a working knowledge of the local      language,  indigenous diet that  appealed to us, and good-to-great reviews by folks who had visited or lived there).

Given this lofty set of criteria, the high marks list did narrow pretty quickly…

London?  Goodbye Seattle rain…Hello London fog and rain.

Paris?  Andrew knows some French but the cultural fit just didn’t feel good to us.

Florence? Rome?  No Italian speakers and, well, close but not quite.

Australia/New Zealand?  Oh now THAT would make visiting family and doing international travel just a bit too difficult.

And then Spain started popping up in the many conversations we were having with current expats &  returning expats  from various places, friends as well- or more well- traveled than we are.  Neither of us had been to Spain, so we did a bit more digging and ticked of most of the hot priorities we had – and Andrew zeroed in on Madrid while I started to obsess on Barcelona.  He said “Madrid is in the very center of Spain and the capitol…rich history, huge cultural oasis, etc”…I said ” Madrid may be in the middle of Spain but it’s not near anything else!  And Barcelona has the Mediterranean, and it’s easy to hop borders to Western Europe, and and and…”  I won that round, but we still knew we couldn’t see moving sight unseen. Enter our December last escapade through Spain (you can read all about that in earlier blog entries) as our ‘ay-or-nay’ trip, and the rest is recent history.

That’s the abridged decision road we took to settle on our Barcelona adventure.  Only time will tell if our educated (albeit slightly crazy) gamble will be worth its weight in tapas and sangria!