…is a response I’ve heard more times than I can count since setting off on a year long journey to America. So why don’t more families up-sticks and try living somewhere else for a while? Well over the next couple of blogs I’m going to explain why, and it starts like most adventures, with a journey.
I’m a secondary school teacher, and I’ve been given a sabbatical from work for the year. My wife runs a cafe and a pub in Keswick, and along with her managers intends to remotely control them from afar. Her task is far for more ambitious than mine, but the rewards are an income where I have none. She also has an American passport, having been born in the States, which allows her to work if she needs to. I have no such luxury and am therefore going to have to subsidise myself for the year. We have two elder children – one of 24 who has voluntarily flit the nest, one of 18 who as a result of our trip is being forced to. We also have 3 smaller children – a boy of 4 and two girls, one is 9 and one is 11.
Bend sits on a bend of the Deschutes River in Central Oregon.
We travelled the states a couple of years ago and fell in love with the town of Bend in Oregon. It has a high desert climate – plenty of sunshine and is cold in the winter. It resides at the foot of Mount Bachelor, a 2764m volcano: opinions are divided as to whether it is extinct or simply inactive – either way it hasn’t gone off for about 10,000 years so no one seems overly concerned. It’s a paradise for Mountain Bikers and Snowboarders alike, which happen to be two of my favourite things. The town itself is full of hipsters with moustaches and is home to 22 craft breweries. With a population of only 80,000, that works out as a brewery for every 3.6k people, which must be impressive as people seem to mention it wherever you go and with Marijuana having been legalised since 2015, there are almost as many dispensaries making this a progressive, liberal, largely anti-trump albeit incredibly ethnically homogeneous haven in Western America.
The pretentious twat that lives inside me believes to really experience a place, one has to live there. My wife’s dad lives in Kansas, and as an ex-veteran with only one arm and a dicky ticker, he cannot travel, so with the inclusion of some planned time with him and a letter in my hand promising that my job was safe, we took the kids out of school, booked some open return tickets to Seattle (the nearest direct airport from Eugene Oregon) and made a plan for adventure. The three younger children were to accompany us, and after much deliberation the dog as well, who is now 13 and ultimately did not make the final cut. More on that later.
It’s easy to glamorise a middle class family existence in an area of natural beauty, but even a happy life can become monotonous, and if you only get one go, you might as well mix it up a bit.
Moving the family to America for a year. It sounds exciting, almost glamorous and everyone I’ve talked to about it stakes claim to envy – so why don’t more people do this sort of thing?
Well firstly, think of how you would pack up your life for a year. I’m 43, my wife and I own the house we’ve lived in for the past 13 years. We don’t have the cash to allow us to leave it empty for a year so we’ve therefore had to pack it all up and rent it out. That in itself was a humungous task – organising tenants, clearing belongings, securing equipment etc it was a nightmare. I had to sell my car – that was also something that could only be described as a ball-ache. We originally intended to take Baxter, my Border Collie, who is as much a part of the family as any of the children, but together with a prohibitively pricy ticket (to fly him would cost more than all 5 of us put together) there was the concern that flying him out was one thing, but if at the end of the year he was considered unfit to fly back then what was to be done with him? I couldn’t really set him free in a field, or worse still have him put down, or maybe simply kiss goodbye to my wife and kids and forge a new life, just me and him. No, it was one of the hardest decisions I have made, but Baxter was to remain with the new tenants of our house. A bonus lodger if you will. Thankfully the new tenants were up for it, and Frankie would be close at hand.
Baxter…
‘Are you excited?’ people mused in the weeks running up to our exit date. No, excited I was not. The closer D-day crept the less sleep I seemed to get. The logistics of exiting Keswick were complicated enough, the logistics of getting 3 children, 2 snowboards, one pair of skis, a mountain bike as well as a years worth of clothing and equipment for all concerned half way across the world seemed almost impossible. The kids can’t carry their own luggage for a week in Tenerife never mind a year in the States so I needed to organise getting out the house, down to Heathrow, over to Seattle and then down to Oregon and over to Bend with a ton of gear and barely a spare pair of hands to help (my wife is amazing in many ways, but shifting heavy goods is not her forte). I then needed to buy a car, and organise accommodation for the year before getting both girls into school in order that I could what? I’m not even sure I knew.
Visas were a whole new world of headaches. Various emails to the American embassy were ignored, and the literature seemed to suggest that casual work-visas were not available to non-Americans, therefore working was not an option for me unless I had a specific job and sponsor, which I did not. One can apply for a 12-month tourist visa, but apparently only 60% of applicants are accepted for these, and if I fell into the 40% of refusals then I would not be let into the country at all. Not even for a long weekend. I therefore had to take the 3-month tourist visa option to avoid risking putting the kibosh on the trip before it had even begun. This would in turn involve either extending it once out there, or alternatively leaving the country every 3 months, only to re-enter which would thereby reset the 3 months grace for a period of up to 2 years. Both options sounded like a hassle, but less hassle than cancelling the trip altogether so hey-ho. Naturally none of this applied to my wife with her dual citizenship – I’m still not sure where the kids fit in to this, I’m presuming it is something she has considered.
The weeks counting down to our flight dates were naturally wrought with stress. My 18 year old step daughter was to move into the staff accommodation in my wife’s pub, and since she neither wanted us to go, or herself to leave home, her reluctance manifested itself in an apathy to pack up and move out. The dog watched with increasing anxiety as we packed up the house around him. Having watched us go on holiday more times than he cared to remember he was well versed in being left behind, and collies are clever – he knew this was different. Simone had 13 years of clutter to work through as boxes and boxes of unopened letters and pre-millennial bank statements were unloaded from the loft to create enough room to store our lives and I watched people, who had no intention of buying my car, kick it’s tyres and tell me how shit it was. I also became increasingly annoyed with well-wishers enquiring as to whether we were all sorted. No, no we weren’t so I’d appreciate it if they stopped with the constant reminders of how much there was still left to do.
But it got done. A lift to Carlisle was organised, along with a National Express Bus to Heathrow, followed by an evening in a Travelodge at the airport, a hopper bus to Terminal 3, a plane to Seattle and a lift from there to Eugene in Oregon, at which point all that was left was to buy a car, pack it and travel to Bend, where I’d even had to the forethought to rent a house with a hot tub for a month while we found our feet and dealt with the rest of the admin. What could possibly go wrong?