postcard 21: back to the beginning
how it all started.
The you’re-sick-now-I’m-sick cycle has gripped us in a Ricola perfumed haze this week and our lives have been a decidedly uninteresting string of 700-page books and tea with too much honey. There was the morning where the water was eerily still and Hazelnut and I spotted dolphins jumping into the hazy sky, and there was trying to pantomime cough suppressant to the woman at the pharmacy who only spoke German, the unexpected winter squash blossoms at the market, but as the novelty wears off, some weeks are just not quite as exciting as others: I think that’s how you know you’ve settled into life in a place. When it feels like just that, life.
Last week, as I typed “20” into the headline box, it felt surreal that we’d somehow been here for 20 weeks already. It made me think of the moment just about a year ago when we set this adventure into motion. So I’m going to rewind a bit and tell you a story.
Sitting in a little bahn mi shop in a strip mall in north Denver, over Vietnamese iced coffees, we asked ourselves if we were really going to do this. Move to Spain. We pulled out our laptops and made a list of everything we’d need to do to get there. Visa requirements, health checks for Hazelnut, putting our things in storage. It reminded me of the last time we’d made a pact to up-end our lives, a couple of kids feeling very grown up at a restaurant in LoDo, trying smoked paprika for the first time and deciding to quit our jobs and move into our car. It'd been the better part of a decade since that moment, but I still felt that same thrill I did back then, or when we first fell in love. Just me and him, (and a loyal dog) taking on the world together.
It wasn’t a random decision, although I’m sure it felt like the kind of wild whims we gravitate towards to most of our friends and family. When we went to Japan on our honeymoon in 2018, we absolutely fell in love with the country. On the plane home, we decided that this was our dream. Topher switched majors and started working towards his TESOL certificate to teach English. Through the pandemic years, it was the dream of moving to Japan that kept us going. Then, 2021 happened. First we unexpectedly lost my beloved Uncle Kurt. Then, we said goodbye to sweet Kenzie dog. And just days into the new year, the rejection letter came. We spent 2022 in a wild loop.
There wasn’t another option, other than the government sponsored program, that would let us move to Japan on one salary. We spent hours and hours researching other possibilities. We interviewed for jobs as caretakers at a random hot springs in Idaho and searched for apartments all over the mountain West. Topher went from job to job, unmoored. I’d fantasized about quitting my job and getting the chance to explore my hobbies and passions and maybe even grad school in Japan. Now, the future was so murky.
We’d handed in the notice for vacating our apartment but three weeks out we had nowhere to go. Maybe we’d spend a few months in Italy, maybe we’d live out of our car again until a one room winter lease was available for a random cabin I’d found in the mountains. My in-laws started cleaning out the spare room in the basement, alarmed.
Then, in July, things started to click. Unexpectedly, the editor position at my magazine opened and I was promoted into the role. Topher found a job he didn’t hate and we decided that rather than throw spaghetti at the wall to desperately see what stuck, we needed to take another year and regroup. We begged the office staff at our apartment to let us renew our lease and we filled out an adoption application for a fuzzy little black and tan puppy. Our lives went from chaos back to purposeful in a matter of weeks, but we made ourselves a promise. Moving abroad was the thing that we wanted most, the dream. It didn’t have to be Japan, but we had to do it with intention. 2023 would be our year.
The key, we’d decided, was a digital nomad visa. Since the pandemic, more and more countries had started offering temporary stay visas for people working remotely for foreign companies. Seemingly every month another country would announce a program. Italy announced they’d be launching one, as well as Spain, and we waited for news of the official application openings with baited breath.
We’d told everyone about Japan, so the letdown felt even harder when it didn’t happen. This time, we kept it quiet, scheming and dreaming behind the scenes. I confided to my dad on our long drives through I-70 traffic to go skiing and we debated the merits of one country versus another. By February, Italy’s visa was still in limbo so our decision was made: we were moving to Spain.
We spent an hour at a UPS store desperately trying to to make the glitchy machine read our fingerprints in the early summer heat. The instructions told us we could omit a fingerprint if the finger was missing, and I’ve never wanted to cut off a limb so fiercely as I did my pinky finger as the prints were rejected again and again. We sent them to the FBI for our background check and they came back rejected—too smudgy. Finally, we found a human who would take our prints. We drove to government offices to get documents certified and emailed the embassy weekly checking on when the official application would open. Finally, we consulted a lawyer. There was a problem, he said. Spain required a form the IRS wouldn’t issue for remote workers. The digital nomad visa was stuck in bureaucratic limbo for Americans. Our options were to become self employed or wait out the double bureaucracy. Or, plan C.
The year before in our frantic search for anything to get us out of Denver and onto an adventure, Croatia’s digital nomad program had crossed our minds. I knew nothing about Croatia and we eventually dismissed it for being a bit too far east for what we were envisioning, but it was still quietly there waiting for us as plan C. We did some more research. It was closer to the Alps, to Italy, than Spain. The cost of living was cheaper. The coast looked beautiful. That's all it took. At that point, we didn’t even think we knew anyone who'd ever been to Croatia. But we were moving there. Soon. In two and a half months, actually, we mused as we submitted our application (which luckily needed all of the same elements we’d prepared for Spain). We ordered a crate for Hazelnut and told our friends and family. We sent in notice on our lease, again, and got a storage unit. We bought plane tickets. It was actually happening.
It’s wild to be sitting here, looking out the window at the seagulls and the drying clothes swinging in the breeze on the line of our neighbor’s house and to think that a year ago, this was just a wild and crazy idea. It’s still a wild and crazy idea, half formed most days, to be honest, but I’ll forever be proud of us for taking this leap and doing this thing. For chasing our dreams and choosing an unconventional path.
Alright, time for some more cold medicine,
-Mikaela