The exhaustion has started to hit. I’m juggling everyday work in the corporate world, which in itself is demanding, supporting my child, my parent (who cannot drive or even leave the two-story apartment due to the railing being unsafe) and the move.

First of all, there are a lot of differences between the move to France and Portugal. I’ll start with the first one. The visa. Where France was going to allow me to have a remove in-home application process with VFS, Portugal requirs us to travel to San Francisco.

Washington to California = More cost: plane tickets, hotel, food, and time off work

France didn’t require an FBI background check with apostille seal. Portugal does = More cost: FBI background fingerprinting, apostille seal

France didn’t require apostille seal on vital records. Portugal does = More cost: apostille seal

I’m sure you see where this is going to the tune of depleting savings.

Not biggie I thought. I put the house up for sale and was expecting the market to continue with a quick sale of the home and the profit to get us to Portugal.

France didn’t require a long-term rental, only a temporary one so no down payment, first and last rent etc while making a mortgage payment here in the states. Portugal requires it at the time of the visa appointment in San Francisco = More cost: rent and realtor fee while also paying for a mortgage here in the U.S.

Bonus: the house isn’t selling. In fact, NONE of the houses in the area are selling and the interest rate went up.

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After much deliberation with family, we decided that the temporary solution would be to rent to the house till the market recovers. At this point I figured I had better hire a tax person to map out my taxes in Portugal = More cost: tax consultant and bad news because of the new rule in Portugal I’ll pay more than a quarter of my income to taxes and if I rent, I’ll actually be paying to keep my house.

Meanwhile, the tax person is telling me how rich I am compared to Portuguese residents? After paying to keep my house as a rental, and paying approximately a quarter of my income to taxes in Portugal? I’m suspicious.

Next thing on the list is insurance because it can take a long time to get on public health care, and that sweet little estimate is 12k euros a year.

More and more and more costs. And that income that would have allowed us some nice breathing room in Portugal – gone my friends.

And now for some more surprise bonuses. You probably thought we were done. You have to have a little over 16 thousand euros in the bank a month before your visa appointment and it has to stay there (this amount is for my D8 visa and my adult dependent). I must open a Portuguese bank account which means paying for the attorney to initiate the process. It also means hundreds in DHL fees to ship it from the US to Portugal. Then, and then this is really fun, the bank forgot a page, and I had to do it again for another 180 dollars to send.

Finally, my friends, we are to the final leg of surprise expenses…the cats. Four cats. Thankfully, the process in France and Portugal are the same. Surprise though – my vet only goes through a service – which you guessed it, costs hundreds. Apparently, I cannot make appointments for the microchip, rabies and health certificates on my own. You read that right. They charge to make the appointments…what a racket.

So, four cats times rabies, microchips, health certificates, plane carriers and plane tickets. Plus, we have a fat one that has to lose weight or they won’t let him fly in the cabin. But guess what because of his breed which makes him a larger cat, he can’t fly in cargo. I guess I’ll carry him on my back and then row us to Portugal? I’m sure there’s a fee tucked into even considering that as well.

Do we still move? Do we stay? Do we revisit one of the other European countries again?

It’s kind of feeling like hell to be honest and the excitement we all had for France and this move are extremely different. Different vibe all the way across the board. Between draining our savings and a portion of my retirement to get the funds in the bank, plus more surprises on the way I’m sure, I’ll be able to write my own fado song at the end of this. I’m morose. I’m forlorn. This isn’t the move I imagined. Not even close to be honest.

Stay tuned for the next steps in the fun of moving – how much more money can I bleed to get to Portugal?

P.S. we haven’t even dealt with the movers yet.

To solidify the deal, my child and I booked a flight for a week in Paris. We met the YouTubers at a meetup and were delighted with the expats there who offered advice and recommendations. We were doing it. We had finally decided and put all our chips on the table for France. We discovered accessibility in Paris not known to us in America. The airport was incredible. Signage was clear and easy. Navigation around the city was simple and the sidewalks were manageable for the most part. Single women were out at all hours of the day and night. What a freedom we felt in this city — our future city. When we came back, we hired a relocation company, started planning with my employer, and away we went, moving forward with the move of a lifetime. I cannot even begin to explain the level of excitement we had. The relocation company was helpful at the beginning and so we paid the installments thinking this was going to all work out beautifully.

This all felt right. Everything was falling into place, and we anticipated a move by early fall.

As we kept going through the process, I thought you know what I’ll just go ahead and get a mammogram before I go and that way I would have a few years of records to take with me. It was during this time that I saw an Instagram post about cadmium in France. Huh, what’s cadmium I wondered as I scrolled past. I looked it up a little later and learned it’s a heavy metal in the soil. I thought meh, no big deal. Anything is safer than the chemicals in our food in the US, right?

Two days after my mammogram, I got a call from the doctor’s office. They found calcifications and a lump. I needed to return.

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Anyone who has ever gotten news like that can attest to the emotions that hit you like a ton of bricks. What about the move? What if something comes back bad? What about my timeline? What about? What if? What about? Even though I had to return for a follow up, it turned out there wasn’t a radiologist in the area. The closest one was a 45-minute drive away (good thing I still had my license) and since there wasn’t a radiologist here everyone was being redirected to it. Translation: they’re booked out. After a solid week of calling and begging for an appointment I got one in 8 weeks.

During the wait, for some reason, I remembered the cadmium. I started digging. The local French doctors were sounding the alarm because young children were testing for levels 3-4 times higher than anywhere else. Cadmium can cause cancer and bone deterioration. France’s leading cause of death is…cancer. Cadmium is found in wheat, rice, cereal, potatoes, and more. The cadmium comes from the fertilizer that France imports from Africa. Years of importing and using that fertilizer and it continues day after day. There’s no purifying or cleansing out cadmium from your body that I am aware.

And my heart broke.

Could we live watching each other eat foods that contain cadmium?

No

I started grasping at straws like a betrayed lover. Were there cities in France with lower levels? Could we still make France work? How could we make France work? But we LOVE France.

In the meantime, the lawyer with the relocation company kept asking me for the same documents over and over, losing track of what we needed in the process. It was a frustrating mess. This was the person we hired to make the visa path easier. Instead, it was convoluted, disorganized and awful.

We sat down and made the decision to abandon France. The cadmium, for us, was non-negotiable. With cancer as a looming dark cloud with my mammogram call back, my parent with osteoporosis and MS, and a child with a still-developing brain, introducing high levels of cadmium were not a good fit. It wasn’t meant to be.

I’m still sad by the way.

Here we went, sad, exhausted, and back to the drawing board. The only country left for us with a viable visa route, in Europe for my mom, was Portugal. And away we went back on the research train. The weather is good. The people are lovely and community-based, it’s walkable though hilly in most of it, medical care is good, public transportation is great. Of course, we dug in deeper to other issues of which I will spare you. But, in the end we decided to focus on the north of Portugal.

During this time, thanks to my sister, I found another facility to get me in for a follow up sooner. It happened to have a radiologist that just arrived from Florida. He is the most amazing radiologist I could have asked for. He pushed to get everything biopsied within s very short period of time, went above and beyond to make sure all spots were looked at and all clear for my move. He also gave me a realistic down and dirty answer that I was looking for if it was the worst-case scenario. I will be forever grateful to him.

And sooner than I even imagined, my results came back clear!

I’ve never been so relieved.

I decided not to pursue the Portugal visa alone, so we found an attorney and the process began…again. I looked into it and got a head start on our FBI background checks, apostille sealing some documents and trying to make everything as smooth as possible. I can confidently say that our attorney has been very good. However, there have been some surprises along the way.

Next week I’ll dive into the differences between France and Portugal for our visa path and the surprises along the way.

My natural instinct was to look at Canada. They’re our neighbors, after all, and lovely people to boot. It would be a close move which would make it easy for the cats and quick to see our family back home.

Step one: could I get a visa? A quick online visit to the consulate resulted in a no. My parent’s age and my child’s dependency on me eliminated all of us. On top of that, Canada doesn’t have a digital nomad visa. As it turns out, countries offering that visa path have dwindled to just a handful compared to what it was during the pandemic, and the ones that still offer it are more stringent. So we said a fond farewell to Canada and our hockey loving neighbors. When I first heard about a digital nomad visa years ago I was intrigued and foolishly thought that would be an easy entry point. Maybe years ago it would have, but countries have scaled back and removed those options. Countries like Italy have even stepped back their citizenship by descent and golden visa routes (or at least made them more challenging to obtain). Going forward with that information and knowing my parent would need to go with us, I focused solely on EU countries.

My parent is a dual US/Irish citizen. Given their age and their needs with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) I decided the easiest move for them would be somewhere in the EU. With freedom of movement in the EU as a dual Irish citizen, it eliminated the stress of a visa and the bureaucracy that is enmeshed in the system. That certainly wasn’t a hard sell for the rest of us so we pushed forward. We really dug into Ireland first. My parent feels a deep connection with Ireland and we have all visited on several occasions. The problem was, and I may face some backlash here, it’s just not at the level of safety we are looking for. Recently, a woman opened a cab company (Lady Cab) because she was tired of hearing from all her female friends that it’s not safe for a woman alone in the city. Incidents keep growing and continue to escalate. We felt like moving to Ireland would be comparable to staying in the U.S. These incidents are mostly focused on the bigger cities but that’s where our focus is placed. To top that off the visa requirements wouldn’t align. I put more effort into this one because of my parent’s deep connection, but it wasn’t the right fit and we really want this to be our last move to our forever home.

Learning that the visa turned out to be the quickest way to eliminate a country, that’s what I started checking first for efficiency and to save my poor eyes from long hours at the computer screen.

I didn’t want to keep wasting time on any country where I couldn’t actually secure a visa with my dependent adult child.

Do you feel the exhaustion yet? I certainly did. But pressing on is what I did. We have dear family friends in Germany, so we agreed to look at Germany, and also explore Belgium, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands.

The beauty of the EU is that it’s also home to medical innovation and human trials working to cure our eye disease, so we’d be in a great position for future hope of restoring some of our vision. I started joining expat groups, watching videos, talking to people, reading blogs, and researching everything I could get my hands on about the countries in the EU.

That journey ultimately led us to decide on France! Ahhhh vive la France. I studied French years ago and love the food, the people, the country, the history. All of it.

And it turned out to be the heartbreak of my life.

Next up: why France and a future there fell apart.

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Not a perfect fit. I’m a realist. I understand there is no perfect place on this earth. We just needed livable. Quality of life.

Consideration of disabilities was the top eliminator.

My parent with MS and mobility challenges cannot trudge through ice and snow to get around town, and on the flip side of that coin, extreme heat would be a danger so any spots like that needed to be eliminated. That meant the East Coast, South, and Midwest went on the chopping block. We focused our search on the West Coast. Coming from California, we understood we’d be priced out of the mild weather areas like San Diego, LA, Orange County, and San Francisco. Also, the desert and Northern California were either too hot, too cold, or didn’t have reliable enough transportation that was safe.

We initially selected Portland, Oregon, until we got there.

We took some scouting trips to Portland, Oregan. Like the high profile spots in California, pricing was out of our affordable zone, and navigating sidewalks with human excrement and needles wasn’t doable with low vision and MS foot drop. While we were there, we also witnessed an unhoused person hit a news lady with a can of beans. This (aside from the beans) also went for Seattle. Then, we explored Olympia, WA and it appeared to be a fantastic option until we realized the downtown didn’t offer safe transport.

Maybe there’s hope in a small town with a local Amtrak station.

We discovered a quaint little town in Washington. It was small, but walkable and reasonably safe. Here’s the catch: the transportation typically drops you in the middle of nowhere, so you then have to get a cab, and the ticket pricing starts eating too far into the budget. Did I mention there are only a few trains a day? Also not a helpful advantage for our needs. The local bus that helps you get around requires a three-day advance reservation, doesn’t always confirm said reservation, and there’s no car service like Uber or Lyft. So, another one off the list. City after city went like this. Around and around we went.

Next we focused on smaller, charming towns.

Too small, and the only way to make it work was living right in the middle of the small downtown, which put us back in the same car-dependent situation to get anywhere else.

After months of this search, which felt like pushing a square peg into a round hole, we came to the down and dirty decision: the US just wasn’t serving our needs.

Next up: what happens when you widen the search past your own border, and how a visa turns out to be the fastest filter of all.