Why Portugal?

My husband and I had been discussing moving out of the US for quite a while. There are many reasons, but the quick easy answer is that we just don’t feel like the US is a good fit for us. If that’s a justifiable reason for parting ways with a job or a relationship, I think it fits here as well.

We discussed many options, and some that we really liked just weren’t practical. For instance, emigrating to New Zealand would have been our first choice, but at our age we would have had to tie up all our net worth in investments. That just seemed too risky.

Our top choices ended up being Sicily, Portugal, and Canada. We considered others but removed them from our list for various reasons. I had an incredibly good feeling about Sicily. I had never been there, but just saying the word and thinking about its rich history made me feel so peaceful and complete. It’s quite possible I would have visited there and realized it also was not a good fit, but we never got that far. But we really liked the idea of being in Europe so that we could explore the whole continent at our leisure.

My husband had concerns about our later years, worried that we might develop memory problems and struggle with a foreign language. This is the main reason we decided we felt most comfortable about Canada. Also, it was easily accessible to my kids and my mother. I won’t go into detail right now about our experience trying to emigrate to Canada. We met a lot of great people and did a lot of cool things in the year and a half we lived there, but we were ultimately defeated by the bureaucracy.

I should point out that we are financially very comfortable. We do not need to work, and we have plenty of money to do whatever we like. It has never been our intention to be a burden on the system of whatever country we landed in. We do a lot to contribute to the local economy. We go out of our way to patronize local small businesses, and we pay our taxes. We try to make things better wherever we are.

After spending a LOT of money trying to make things work in Canada, we decided to move on. We had taken a trip to Europe and spent a couple of weeks in Porto and Ponta Delgada. We really liked Portugal, so when we realized that Canada wasn’t going to work out, we changed our focus to Portugal. We also made a couple more visits to make sure where we wanted to live in the Porto area. Things fell into place nicely as we began the process to get our visa.

My husband is a big wine enthusiast and sommelier, so it was important to live in a good wine region. We also wanted a temperate climate, good restaurants, good views, and lots of history. The Porto area checks all those boxes. There are several Michelin star restaurants close to us, and we have been enjoying trying them all.

So here we are, in our tiny 1-bedroom apartment, waiting for our residency cards and for our permanent home to be completed. They tell us it (our condo) should be done in the next month or two. The residency cards…who knows? I’ll keep you posted.