The best places I've never lived

Planning international moves is my coping mechanism

One thing that could tell you a lot about me is that before we moved to Amsterdam, I had spent a grand total of one day in the city, fifteen years before. Not even a night—just a long layover on my way home from a study abroad in Syria. I flew into Schiphol, took a train into the city, spent the day wandering, then rode the train back to the airport and caught my red-eye back home.

What do I remember from that day in 2001? How to explain… Amsterdam felt like the Emerald City. I have this enduring image of impossibly clean streets, small bridges doubled in mirror-like canals, brick façades in so many fantastical shapes they looked like fairytale gingerbread. I spent hours in the Rijksmuseum, my first European art museum. And then I walked across the lawn to the Van Gogh, my second European art museum.

At the ATM, crisp, colorful bills slid out. I think I recall someone explaining to me that they were guilders on one side and euros on the other—something to do with the fact that it was right in the middle of the transition to a single European currency.

It was the memory of that one day of magic in Amsterdam that drew me back fifteen years later, with my husband and kids and our European dream. (Of course, it was also the great job market, low college tuition, excellent public schools, and car-free lifestyle.)

The year we moved to Amsterdam, they covered the lawn outside the Van Gogh Museum with a maze made from thousands of sunflowers.

Visiting beforehand—even for a day—was an anomaly for us. Before Amsterdam, we would just up and move, sight unseen. To Italy. To Tunisia. To Florida. Etc.

Which is not to say we didn’t plan those moves. We did. Exhaustively. But we were on a shoe-string budget, and—rightly or wrongly—international reconnaissance just wasn’t a line item we felt we could afford.

Also, we thought we were pretty good at planning. And for the most part, we were. Although there was that one time where the furnished one-bedroom in Florence ended up being a studio, and we were stuck there with two small kids bouncing off the walls, and my husband ended up taking Transatlantic business calls from the bathroom, because that was the only quiet place in the house.

Us in the “bedroom,” which was open to the living room. The fact that we’d told ourselves a one-bedroom would work in the first place says a lot. But we made the best of it! I love the little row of shoes along the wall.

Somewhere along the line, planning a move became a sort of reflexive impulse. We did it when we were feeling frustrated about the weather, the culture, the food, our jobs, or anything else about where we lived. We did it when we were stressed over money. We did it when we were happy and content—armchair travel as relaxation.

We used to often act on the urge to follow through with these plans. We moved a dozen and a half times during our first decade of marriage. And although each and every time we convinced ourselves that a move was the way to solve our problems, looking back, it’s conceivable that sometimes it exacerbated them. Still, I suppose when it comes to mistakes made in your twenties, you could do worse than seeing too much of the world. Or at least, so I tell myself.

When we moved to Amsterdam, my husband and I made a sort of pact with each other: we’d stay put here until the kids finished high school. I wasn’t sure if we could really do it—never having done anything like it before—but we were committed to do our darndest.

In 2018, we hit three years in Amsterdam—the longest we’d ever lived in one place since we got married. We felt antsy. My husband quit his job and started a business. I quit my job and went to grad school. But we didn’t move! We stayed put, and found other ways to make life interesting.

In 2023, we hit eight years in Amsterdam—the longest I’d ever lived in one place in my life. What for most people is probably the easiest, most normal thing in the world, for me felt like a huge accomplishment.

Now it’s been a decade, which I still can’t quite believe.

In the meantime, I’m sure you can guess our coping mechanism. You know how they say anticipation is half the fun? Have you ever tried making it ALL the fun? Here’s a life hack: plan an international move, and then go ahead and DON’T execute it. A smoother, less stressful experience all around.

We’re still obsessed with virtual househunting on whatever constitutes the local Zillow. We found our current house on funda.nl. Tony still has the app on his phone, and whenever we’re out and about—in different neighbourhoods of Amsterdam or further afield in the Netherlands—he likes to whip it out to see what’s available.

In Ireland we found our little flat above a pub on daft.ie. We also found dozens of darling and impractical thatched roof cottages out in the countryside that I still dream about.

Bedtime stories in our flat in Mullingar, Ireland. I loved that slate roof across the street, and the jackdaws that visited were impossibly exotic to me.

We’ve been doing this so long that sometimes I’ll say fondly to my husband, “Remember when we lived in the Dordogne?”

We never lived in the Dordogne.

But I did once come home from the library with a gorgeous coffee table book full of castles and rivers and rustic country bread. It was early on in our fantasy of moving abroad. We were young parents with two toddlers and a struggling business. We didn’t have bandwidth for much more than dreaming.

We dreamed ourselves into the Dordogne as if we’d been transported there by a magic door. We could see so clearly that rose-entwined gate, opening on a path through a sunny garden that stopped at a little wooden door flanked by shuttered windows with linen tie-up curtains.

This is not our house in the Dordogne, since we’ve never even been to the Dordogne. But somehow, I’m always looking for that house every time I set foot in France. This one’s in a darling little town called Merry-sur-Yonne in Bourgogne-Franche-Comté.

We talked incessantly about our house in the Dordogne. It was so real in our heads that once my husband was chatting with the guy at the front desk of our housing complex in San Diego. Turned out he was from France.

“Ah!” my husband remarked, “we used to live there!”

But when the French guy inquired as to where exactly we had lived in France, he couldn’t understand our response. We’d tried in vain to teach ourselves how to pronounce “Dordogne”, and it always came out garbled. It’s probably good the conversation didn’t get any further, since there was nothing else to say about our completely fictional sojourn in France.

And yet, I have such fond memories of when we lived in the Dordogne (in our heads). It’s a kind of doubled nostalgia for me: young and dreaming of a different life, and at the same time the vividness of that dream—chickens in the garden, mornings bringing home baguettes in a market basket, our kids growing up with perfect French tripping off their tongues.

It never happened; it’s one of the many lives I’ve imagined but never lived.

And then there’s Greece. Our move to Greece may be the most complete plan we have ever made without following through. It is also, as far as I remember, the only one we planned with other people. The whole thing began very organically; we sent out our yearly Christmas email (from Florida), and I put in a more or less throwaway line: “Goals for next year: move to Europe, and get a puppy. In that order.”

Not Greece. I’ve never been to Greece. This is Tunisia, the home of ancient Carthage and also a lot of amazing classical ruins. At Dougga you can roam through an entire Roman city, perfectly preserved out in the desert. It’s beautiful, and unreal.

A friend replied to the email saying that he was planning to spend six months on his family’s ancestral Greek island the next year. Another friend wrote back asking a question about taxation for Americans abroad. A third friend joked about renting out a small castle in the French countryside and starting a commune.

One thing led to another, and pretty soon we were in a loose group (proto-commune?) with four families, talking about raising each other’s kids and goats and chickens, and painting and dancing and exploring somewhere in the world.

“Europe, preferably,” we said.

“Somewhere warm, where we could live in yurts,” we all agreed. Spain? Italy? Malta? Greece? The emails flew thick and fast as we collectively fantasised and finessed the details.

Turned out the Greek friend had a piece of property on an island in the Cyclades, perfect for yurts, at least other than during the impossibly windy months. Building permits would be a nightmare, but that was no problem: we wouldn’t need them as long as we moved the yurts often enough for them to be considered impermanent structures. Ah! the impractical optimism of youth. If by youth you mean mid-thirties with two kids and ten years of marriage behind us. But I digress.

By this time we had a spreadsheet budget, and we were Skyping to discuss details, looking at plane tickets to Greece, approaching other families we barely knew to see if they wanted to join our commune. I even convinced my boss to let me work remotely from abroad.

At some point, not many months before this imminent move, you could say we came to our senses. Or were forced to. It became apparent that our friends were somewhat less serious about the move than we were.

And how serious were we? Good question. I guess we’ll never really know. I do think I might someday write a dark, twisty novel about that commune in Greece that never came to be.

Also not Greece. This is sunset in the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento, Sicily.

You might think this is the end of that story. But no. We made an abrupt destination switch to Amsterdam, a move which we spent far less time planning, but did somehow manage to turn into reality. So there’s that.

The swing from an idyllic commune in rural Greece to an urban flat in cosmopolitan Amsterdam might seem extreme. But that’s kind of the point. Aesop’s fable of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse is one of the shared myths that give texture to our relationship, a recurring theme in the ongoing odyssey that is our life together.

It’s not that one of us is City and the other Country. Rather, we’re both equally both. In the country we miss the culture and congeniality of the city; at home in the city we long for trees and fields and quiet. The one thing that’s perennially clear is that the gloomy in-betweenness of the suburbs is not for us. We are, perhaps, creatures of extremes. The Country Mouse forever shedding his skin to become the City Mouse, and vice versa, ad infinitum.

We’ve been city mice for ten years in Amsterdam. And for pretty much that whole time, we’ve been dreaming of Italy. It’s the landscapes we crave. Not Rome or Milan or even Florence, but a place in the countryside. Quiet mornings brightened by birdsong. Mist in the olive groves.

For almost two decades, we’ve been stalking subito.it (and immobiliare.it and casa.it, and various websites of Italian realtors) for castles, beach cottages, stone ruins, vineyards, farmhouses. Real estate takes a long time to sell in Italy. The kinds of places we dream about tend to be on the market for months, if not years—which, ok, might lead to some level of obsession from time to time. We like to build out elaborate plans, imagining all the details of our life in Italy.

It was only one of these many plans that became attached to the house in Italy we ultimately bought. It’s in town, but a small enough town that it’s a five minute walk to sunset on the river gorge, or trailheads through woods.

But it’s also around the corner from the Medieval bakery, and up the street from a cappuccino in the piazza. It was empty for two years, and I’m pretty sure I was the first one to come along and walk into that unfinished cellar and think, “bookshop!”

I’m desperately looking forward to moving there. I can’t believe it’s actually happening, even in the future. And it will be by far our most planned move yet. But in some ways, it feels so random to me which ones of my many imagined moves have crossed over into reality. I spend a lot of time living in my dreams. Sometimes my therapist asks me polite, veiled questions that make me think I might spend too much time in my dreams. Stubbornly, I secretly rephrase it in my head: I have an unusually rich inner life.

In a way, though, I think she might be right. Maybe there is something pathological in that persistent urge to deny reality. Or maybe it’s the foundation of my best creative impulses. One or the other. Perhaps both? The truth is, I think I’m a little scared of arriving at any ultimate destination. No matter how beautiful my life, I always need a castle in the air.