Our Last Month In California. We Leave For Spain In 31 Days.

Today marks the second day of my last month in California. On January 2nd, my wife and I are moving to Spain.

It's a strange, but good feeling.

Right now, I feel a mix of nervousness and excitable anticipation. Part of it is just wanting to experience and get on with the emotions I know we're going to feel when we say goodbye to this (mostly) great state.

You experience them. You feel them. You put them in your back pocket and recall them fondly as you navigate, in this case, the second act of life.

My Substack newsletter experienced a growth spurt over the Thanksgiving weekend due to an SF Gate article I wrote that went viral. LinkedIn subscribers receive 50% off one year of the newsletter at this link.

The article explained the urban planning-related rationale around why we want to leave. Who would have thought something so straightforward could trigger so much vitriol in the cesspool that is the comments section of popular social media platforms?

Reading the article beyond the headline probably would help!

Anyway, the main point of the article is that - thanks to our car culture - even America's greatest cities are not as and likely will never be as pedestrian-friendly and social as Europe's many great cities, including Valencia, which is where we're headed for in Spain. I don't really think this is up for debate.

In America’s urban neighborhoods, like in Spain and throughout many European cities, car-free and pedestrian-friendly design should be the readily accessible default — the norm — located just outside your front door.?

It’s this type of city life that I have been craving for years. I have a vision of taking the routines, rituals and seemingly mundane tasks of a day-to-day life I enjoy in California to the next level in a country where quality of life can be exponentially higher, in part, because of bold but common-sense city planning.

Combine a preferred physical environment and the public social life it helps facilitate with a lower cost of living and many of the things we love about California (great weather, proximity to a major body of water, diversity) and it almost feels like it doesn't make sense to stay in the US.

At the same time, I turn 50 next year. My wife will be 46. It's a point in life where lots of people start giving in to the notion that at certain ages, you stop doing certain things. I don't buy this one bit. If you take this too far - if you get too comfortable - you risk physical and mental stagnation. That's at least how I see it, having a pretty good handle on how I function.

While the move into a more ideal urban setting should be a smooth transition, there will be obstacles along the way as we settle in and beyond. For starters, I'm learning Spanish. And it's not easy. Of course, we have to deal with the immigration part of the equation, which, so far, seems straightforward enough to navigate, but there's still lots of work, considerable expense and multiple learning curves.

In essence, we're challenging ourselves out of a good situation. We could stay in California and be just fine, other than the not-so-small point that we would definitely be renters for the rest of our lives. In Spain, we have a fighting chance to buy an apartment in our preferred setting. That aside, we could stay, but the physical and mental muscles we'll be using to build a new life in Spain are the very same ones that would basically go through the motions if we stayed in California.