I love to travel. I have wanted to experience living abroad for as long as I can remember. Kyle and I used to talk about it and it was always something we wanted to do “someday.” Originally we were looking at Spanish speaking countries because I speak enough Spanish to get by. At first Costa Rica, Panama, and Mexico were all on our list in part because of their proximity to the United States. We had been to Cozumel, Mexico a few times and we loved it. We took a 10 day trip to Costa Rica and we loved it there too.

When I got pregnant with Sofia we decided that we wanted to move abroad before she began school. We started to make serious plans to move abroad. A top requirement of mine is that I do not want a car. I want to walk and take public transportation. That made Costa Rica, Panama, and Mexico more difficult. You can live in any of those places without a car, but we wanted to be able to travel around pretty freely, and it just seems a lot easier with a car in those countries.

I’ve always wanted to live in Europe, but dismissed it as being too expensive. At some point I read that Portugal and Spain are pretty affordable. Immediately I began looking at Spain. I narrowed in on Valencia pretty quickly and I started learning everything I could about living there and their visas. I wasn’t quite sure that we qualified, but figured we could swing it and it was worth a try. Then I got pregnant with Leo, and the second dependent would have made the financial requirements hard to meet.

I had looked at Portugal before, but couldn’t narrow down where to live, so I had turned my attention back to Spain. This time I looked at Portugal’s visas, and the D7 was a great fit. We more than met all of the requirements, including the financial ones. For the next year I researched Portugal. I kept trying to narrow down where to live, but all I did was expand the list. There are so many cities and towns I want to check out.

Portugal is fairly easy to travel around without a car, especially if we live in a bigger city. It’s easy enough to access the rest of Europe from there. Spain is their neighbor. I have read time and time again that Portuguese people are incredibly friendly and helpful. I know that in Portugal family matters, and kids matter. I like that Portugal does not have the same gun culture that we have in the US. I love that Portugal is a safe country. There seem to be a lot of positives. That sealed the deal and we knew that Portugal was the place for us.

As we get closer to moving it can be easy to focus on wanting to leave the US. Even though there are some reasons we want to leave the US, ultimately we are moving because we want to experience living in another culture. We want to be able to travel around Europe and obviously living in Portugal would make that significantly easier. We want our kids to experience other cultures.