It’s Bonaire :)

We finally found our spot! We’ve been planning to leave the states for years but haven’t found the place that feels like “home.” The place where it just feels right to be there, until Bonaire.

It’s funny how life works out sometimes. We’d been to Bonaire in 2012 and loved it but when we got serious about leaving back in 2015, Bonaire didn’t come back up as anything more than a passing idea that was quickly dismissed. Why? Because we made assumptions and those assumptions were wrong. We assumed because it’s Dutch it would be hard to work legally (wrong) and that the cost of living there would be too high (you guessed it, wrong again).

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So, we have hurricane Irma to thank for reuniting us with what will be our future home. We were trying to go to St. Croix in the fall of 2017. It’s a US territory & easy for us to work there. They’ve also got great diving so we thought we should check it out. Irma then Maria pummeled the island and I had to make a quick decision while changing our flights for the third time and said “fly us to Curacao” knowing we could grab a puddle jumper to Bonaire which is blissfully located on the edge of the hurricane belt. As they say, the rest is history. We’ve been to the island 4 times since, spending as much time there as possible to make sure it’s the right fit and we both feel like it is.

What’s next?

We have job offers starting this summer and we’re planning to take them. There’s a lot of paperwork required for the visas so we’ve started chipping away at that and we’ve been casually looking for rentals. It might be hard to find a place right away with our dogs but we’ll work it out. We got married too! After 15 years together. We enjoyed a nice, long engagement of 10 years and finally took the plunge. Kidding aside, it’s better to leave the country married so we did it. We hadn’t done it previously because not being married benefited us. Romantic, I know.

Here we go!