Life Abroad
What Comes Next?
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Yesterday B and I had a sort of semi-breakdown about our travel plans starting April 17, when we plan to leave Madrid and Spain altogether after one full year of living abroad.
The plan has been that we’re going to buy a car and road-trip slowly over the course of several months making our way slowly east to Albania, staying a few weeks in each place, southern France, northern Italy, along the way. The problem has been threefold:
1. We have three cats
2. B wants stability
3. We both feel conflicted about returning to the United States
We’ve had all sorts of wild and non-wild ideas: Move to Asia for three months and then return to the USA. Move to Albania. Live in multiple countries slowly over time, in and outside of the Shengen Zone. Move to Mexico City, Panama or Costa Rica where it’s supposed to be fairly easy to move for Americans. Or, of course: Simply call the whole thing quits and move back to America in April. Also we could potentially extend our stay here in Madrid three additional months after the one year ends, getting us to the start of July, 2026.
B wants home stability and I definitely empathize with and understand that. I mean, look at my own track record between just 2019 and now: I lived in the Bay Area, then New York City, then Santa Barbara, then Lompoc, then Portland, Oregon and then Madrid. B and I started dating on August 24th, 2022, about 3.5 years ago now, and we together lived in Lompoc, Portland and Madrid. Everything was the waiting game: Waiting for my cancer-ridden father to die; waiting to sell my Bay Area house; waiting to leave Lompoc; waiting to flee Portland for Spain; etc.
So I really do understand B’s point of view on stability. Part of me wants stability too, of course. And I also really, really miss small towns, nature, hiking, backpacking, all things I had in Santa Barbara, Lompoc and Portland but, without a car in Madrid, we do not have here. More than that there are also things B plans to do, like going back to college for her Bachelor’s degree, which she never got and still craves.
Which leads us to the cats. These three cats are basically our children. B has an actual human child, a 20-year-old son (she had him when she was just 19; she’s only now about to turn 40), but our cats are our live-in kids. Two are hers and one is mine. They do not get along, by the way. We have a complex routine of separating them in different rooms at certain times, etc.
The first obvious thing to say is: Clearly, a lot of moving around from place to place, not to mention plane and car travel, is bad for cats. It stresses them out. They get spooked and unhappy. When we flew the ten hours from LAX to Madrid in April, 2025, the three boys stayed in the hold and when they emerged they had clearly been traumatized. All those loud sounds and noises and the confusion of what we were doing, why, and when it might end. It was also difficult to do all the basic procedural stuff for them as far as documents, vet visits, etc.
We both want our babies to be happy, of course. Two of our cats are pretty easy and adaptable in this way—my Tuxedo who went with me from the Bay Area to NYC to Santa Barbara to Lompoc to Portland to Madrid and I now consider more or less a feline travel expert—and one of B’s cats, Klaus. But her other cat, whom we call Kitty Bear, a giant, muscular, beautiful Siamese, is more affected. He is very loving and needy and gets easily stressed. B feels more that it’s unkind—even perhaps borderline cruel—to move our cats too much. I understand that point of view but I guess for me I feel like two of them are pretty chill about it and we can minimize the movement as much as possible for the third.
After discussion between us it seems the best two options boil down to this: Either fly with the cats to Albania, where U.S. citizens can stay hassle-free for a whole year without a visa, and then fly back to the States…OR...fly back to the States directly from Madrid, either in April or July depending on whether we extend another three months after the one year.
We’ve also discussed going back to the States and, while there, working on a visa to move longer term to Mexico City. I’ve spent some time there and I loved it. It’s an incredible city and living there would give us access to easy travel around South America. Plus we’d be closer to B’s family (and my mom, the only one in my family I am close to) in Southern California; it’s about half the plane time from Mexico City to SoCal versus to Madrid, 5 hours versus 10.
The truth is we both feel equally conflicted. We know we’ll likely end up back in the States—at least for a while—but the question is: Now or in another year? We’re both born and raised in coastal Southern California and we love our native state but it’s also expensive and we’d rather try something new, living in a state we’ve never lived in before, such as New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado. We’ve also discussed the potential idea of buying another house somewhere outside expensive California.
We’ve done a fair amount of research on Albania. It’s about 1,400 miles northeast of Spain; it borders Greece to the south, Macedonia to the east, Kosovo and Montenegro in the north. The photos are beautiful. It’s not part of the EU but is expected to join in the relatively near future. It’s a sort of up-and-coming nation. Generally Albania is low-crime, safe, friendly to Americans, has a small but thriving and growing expat community, and is dirt-cheap. (You can buy homes there for as low as $30,000, but more standard is $50,000 to $120,000, but still!) Much of the western side of the country is along the Adriatic Sea, which photos show as looking stunning. It’s so cheap there we could even save money.
There are some downsides to Albania as well, of course. (There are always tradeoffs.) English is not the norm outside of big cities and expat communities. There is some corruption in the government and culture. (Mafia operates along parts of the coast but expats say the people never experience this in any real way.) Sometimes water and even electricity for short periods disappear. There’s a history of USSR communism during the Cold War. The infrastructure isn’t what we expect in the States nor in Spain. If you need serious medical care you have to go outside of Albania.
On the flip side there’s rugged natural beauty. We could get a car and hike. We’d be able to explore a new culture and travel around other nearby nations like Greece. We can stay one year without the hassle of getting a visa. It would be a nice slower transition from Europe to the States instead of just immediately being dropped back into America in April or July direct from Spain. (We also worry a little about the States given all the negative news coming in a la Trump, ICE, polarization, shootings, etc.)
And…being there for one year would at least give B some stability, and it would be better for the cats as far as that goes, instead of road-tripping around Europe moving from place to place every few weeks and having to deal with crossing many international borders, etc. While we’re in Albania we can have people watch our cats—as we do here all the time—and travel around, maybe even go to India for a couple weeks which is something I really want to do. (We’d at least be closer in Albania, if not exactly “close.”) The cats would at least be stable for another whole year.
Anyway. I don’t know for sure what we’re going to end up doing, but as of now we seem to be leaning towards Albania. One year in Albania and then home to the States, most likely. Or, we can also apply for residency in Albania and try to stay there longer term if we really liked it. (We’ve never actually been there, by the way, just like we’d never been to Madrid before we moved here. Research can help a lot. Plus a sense of adventure and risk.) Or we might return to the States in 3 or 6 months if we didn’t like Albania, and do it that way, possibly moving to Mexico City after a while or maybe just staying put in the States, whatever city we end up living in.
This life of ours is in many ways very privileged. We know that. We are grateful for the opportunities. We see things through both similar and different angles. I have only my mom as far as family and I’ve never been a big “family of origin” person. B, on the flip side, has a massive family between three people: Her mom, her dad and her stepdad. And she misses her son constantly (though he lives in Lompoc and we wouldn’t move back there regardless of what plan we follow). Again we love our three furry boys, too, and want to make sure they are OK and relatively happy.
And like I said on some level we both want stability, whether it be sooner or later. A home or apartment to settle in for multiple years or longer, one area to be in. Simultaneously we also want to desperately travel the world. It’s a conundrum. B is 40, I am 43. We’re still relatively “young” in broad terms. We have no kids of our own between us. We love each other very much and., despite the fact that we spend nearly all our time together day and day out, we never run out of things to say. We understand each other, and that is priceless. We fight sometimes, for sure, but in the end the fights always bring us even closer.
Our lives are a mix of routine and staggering boredom mixed with incredible excitement and the rush of travel. We’re going to Southeastern Africa for 17 days in one week from now: Kenya, Tanzania, Zanzibar. Sometimes I do feel like we’re “running” from something, symbolically, something internal, that being on some level “growing up” and facing the Real World like everyone else, settling, being in one place, letting go of the adventures.
But then my other side—my adventurous, contrarian, you-only-live-once side—rises out of me and rejects all that fighting instead for freedom, travel, experience, movement, exploration. It’s always a push and pull between me and B. She’s the more practical, money-minded, hard-working one, generally speaking. I’m the eccentric, adventurous artist. We support, cleave and diverge from each other, and also help one another to understand what we both really want. There are always sacrifices one or the other of us has to make, and we have to compromise often.
Either way, life is a journey.