During my writer’s course in England last January, I was discussing my ideas for a book with one of my tutors. The conversation swirled around the life altering decision of basically selling everything we owned in the US, picking up the entire family, and moving to Spain – in our early 40’s. My tutor asked what was the defining moment, the catalyst that spurred the move, the switch that turned on, the pinpoint event where we decided to flip our lives upside down. And I could not define it.
There wasn’t any huge trauma that happened to us. Our lives were, by any US standard, normal. We were an upper middle class, business owning family. We lived in the suburbs of Atlanta, surrounded by great friends and loads of family. We had established roots and our daughter was making ranks in one of the best elementary schools in the county. We got up every weekday morning like everyone else. I had a routine of waking at 6:45 AM, making a gallon of coffee, watching the first 15 minutes of national news with my favorite cast on Good Morning America , feeding the dogs, and then waking the rest of the household to get the day started. My daughter caught the bus every morning at 8:15 AM and was dropped off at 4:45 PM. My husband and I left for work at the same time, and often arrived back home around the same time. We would both eat fast food for lunch, and, most often, at our desks to continue working right through the time of supposed rest. Even at separate offices and careers, we had the same workday routine. My husband worked with homeowners and I worked with banks, but they were the same complaining and demanding clients. After work, I would swing by the grocery store and pick up a bottle of wine along with the makings for a dinner. My husband would make the meal, and then we would watch an hour or two of TV where I often fell asleep on the sofa. The next day was simply just a repeat.
And that’s when I realized all of the above that was the catalyst. Not a single specific episode, but an accumulation of hundreds of identical events, day in and day out. My life was good, but it was boring. I was working just to pay bills and replay my days in the exact same manner. We lived robotic routines. It was when our lives were dotted with travel and experiences that we became alive, but most trips were once a year, if not every other year.
During one weekend in 2014, we had friends over for a cookout. My best friend, Tasha, was onsite along with one of my daughter’s best friends from school. We were hanging out in the kitchen and started talking about places to travel and affairs we wanted to experience. We began to discuss bucket lists and explained the concept to my daughter and her friend. I decided that everyone in the room would make a Top 10 Bucket List without discussion. Once completed, we would compare events and places to see if any matched up.
Not surprisingly, my daughter (age 9 at the time) put a shopping spree to Target as her #1 Bucket List item. This shows how mundane our lives had become. But, surprisingly, 4 of the 5 people in the room, wrote down Paris. And then the lists were loaded with places like Machu Picchu, the Pyramids of Egypt, and the Great Wall of China. And they were brimming with experiences like a submarine dive to explore the Titantic at the bottom of the ocean, sailing the French Polynesian Islands, and cycling part of Le Tour de France. There were some really exotic and exciting items on our agenda!
And with 30 something uniquely glamorous events and romantic places to visit, my husband calculated that with our rate of travel every other year, we should be able to complete half of them by the time we reached seventy years old. 70! And that suddenly became unacceptable and abhorrent. We would spend the next 30 years of our lives, completing only half of the Bucket List items. How would we choose which places to visit and which ones to cross off? And why was the answer crossing places off the lists instead of finding a way to complete the lists in less than 30 years? What were we doing with our lives? And this became the definitive moment that my husband describes as the turning point. This is where he said, “Why not?” instead of “Can not.”
Previous to this moment, we were following the course of the American Dream. We were on a merry-go-round, doing the unremarkable until we retired and became old. We were living to pay bills while the cosmos went unexplored. We looked out into the world and it was really big, and it was begging us to unearth it simply because of a Bucket List. We were not innately built to follow this humdrum. We decided that we wanted to have adventure every day, delve into new places, recount narratives, and cross off places from the lists. With nearly 10 places on the Bucket Lists based in Europe, our answer was to move. We looked back to our favorite experience and trip, and we agreed that it was Barcelona. We had traveled within the Catalunya region of Spain for 10 days in 2007. It was exhilarating and so much fun! We boldly explored and told the best stories with the most laughter. Barcelona is central with a busy airport, and most major cities are less than a 3 hour flight. With a love of this city and its architecture, we quickly determined that we would relocate to Barcelona.
The next weeks would start our planning. How? When? Can we? Should we? There were so many questions. And I was scared. I was so nervous. But I was also really stinking excited. I had always pined for more, but I kept those deviating thoughts down because it they didn’t fit within the paradigm of life in the US. Alas, my husband also had these thoughts and we had verbalized them. And now, we could hardly muster keeping up with the routine, the mundane, the day in and the day out. Turns out, we made a 5 year plan to move giving us ample time to wrap up our businesses, save enough money, and sell everything. We did it in 3 years. The actual plan is left for another blog post as the intentions went in all different directions, including an 18 month RV road trip around the US!
I write down all these feelings and circumstances leading up to our move abroad because I had nearly forgotten all the pain associated with the ordinary and the boring since calling it quits on the US model for a good life. I have been reminded of these feelings while under strict lockdown here in Spain. We have spent 7 weeks in confinement, and we started to develop daily routines. For the past few weeks, I rise a little early and check out the sunrise. I make a carafe of coffee. I spend an hour or so looking over social media, and checking the news and statistics on Covid-19. I walk the dog. Weekly, I make a grocery store run. Then, I walk the dog every evening. We plan for the 5 or more daily feasts. I check social media again and analyze all the confusing data. I may shake the daily groove with an art project or furniture rearrangement. I try not to focus on all the travel with friends and family that we canceled. But I can’t help feeling like I am stuck again, doing the same grind, just in a more colorful city. It is depressing and it was taking a toll on my mental state.
But there is deescalation! Our lockdown flattened the curve and we are on the descent. Spain has a plan and if the measurements are met, then the provinces will be open in July 2020. This means, we can travel again within Spain. We can have adventure. We can get out of this little space. We can make some stories. We can try to make new plans with our friends and family when the border and Europe reopens. And we can continue to cross items off the Bucket List…I’m ready to get on with it!
Loosely Lucy 
You need to buy a sailboat…no lock downs. 😉
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