Why go where it’s warm?

In case you’re curious, here’s a bit more about us. We’re a couple in our late 30s, both 37 as of this writing. We live on the mid-Atlantic coast just a few blocks from the water. We absolutely love our neighborhood! It’s made up of an eclectic group of beach lovers & we’ve met a lot of terrific people here. During the summer, everyone gets around with golf carts & beach cruisers. The beach is dog-friendly and there’s almost always an impromptu doggie play date going on for our dogs to join. This June will be 10 years since we moved here. The area isn’t touristy, so our neighborhood beach bar and restaurants are filled with people we know. It’s a great place to live. If we were staying in the states, we’d stay here and become snow birds for the winter someday when we could afford it. We can walk to the beach in just a few minutes and have a trailer on our beach cruisers for our paddle boards in the summer. There’s a gorgeous state park down the street with trails for hiking and biking. Our house is a little cottage that’s been built onto over the years. We’ve decorated and painted it just the way we like it and our backyard is a small sanctuary amongst the dense housing often found close to the beach. You might be saying to yourself, it sounds pretty sweet, so why do you want to leave?

The truth is, it is a sweet place to live and we’re grateful for everyday we’ve spent in this cool beach neighborhood. We will definitely miss it! We found it slightly by chance too which makes it even sweeter. My other half is from the area and knew of the neighborhood, but didn’t have much experience with it. I’m from the Northeast, so I didn’t have a clue and trusted his instinct. We sold our condos in a matter of weeks & bought our little house. We packed up my place in CT, dropped the condo keys off at the closing and got in the moving truck and started south on our new adventure. After a little bout of homesickness in the first few months, I was hooked.

So, why leave?

Well, a few reasons:

1. We can’t afford to live here without both working full-time office jobs. I’m not sure who came up with a 5 day on/2 day off work schedule, but it’s not what we want for our lives. That’s a whole lot of life spent inside in a completely unnatural environment. We only have one life and that’s not what we want for the long-term.
2. We can’t dive here like we want to. There are diving opportunities here in the summer and we have some great wrecks to explore, but it’s not the type of diving we’re interested in long-term. It’s cold (7mm wetsuits, 6mm booties, gloves, hoods, etc), the visibility is pretty bad (sure there are some lucky days) and the distance to dive sites is far (hope you didn’t want to do anything else on your Saturday!).
3. It’s cold in the winter! There are colder places, but it’s still colder than we’d like our winters to be. We have some nice days mixed in, it was 70 last Sunday but this week it was also 0. We want to be warm and outside as much as possible. We hate being trapped inside. In the summer, we live outside. On the beach, in the park or out on our deck watching the birds. There are full days spent entirely outside from the time we get up till the time we go to bed. What could be better?

Here’s our hit list of what we want out of our new location:

• Warm!!!!!  Duh!
• Great diving with easy access to dive sites.
• Somewhere simple with a much lower cost of living than the states.
• A small, tight-knit community with a strong group of expats.
• A place with a strong diving industry where we can complete our IDC training, find jobs and make enough to live a simple life with our dogs.

Where will that be? Stay tuned for our current top pick.

Warm thoughts to all!