It’s Been A Long Time Comin’

Ok. . . . . I’ll be the first to admit that it might seem like we made the decision to move from Minnesota to Florida overnight. That couldn’t be further from the truth though. In fact, the decision to make the move from The North Star State to The Sunshine State has been a long time comin’. . . . longer than you might think.

There are a lot of places that the story of how we made the decision to move to Florida could start. For me personally, the idea of moving to Florida first came about in the late 90’s. [That’s an entirely different story for another day though.] As a couple, we first started toying around the idea of moving to Florida somewhere around 2016. The concept of moving to Florida wasn’t by any means new to either of us. While we’d never talked much about it, mostly because we loved where we lived and had no intention to leave, it was something we’d thrown around in conversation from time to time. That is, until 2016 rolled around.

By 2016, we’d been living in a small town not far from Hiroshima and celebrating our 10 year wedding anniversary. Naturally, that milestone had us thinking about our future. We had a firm grasp on where we were and an idea of where we wanted to be, but the question was how we were going to achieve just that. This is something that can be difficult to work out under the best of circumstances; it’s borderline impossible when you’re an expat. Coupled with a few other current events that we knew would present additional challenge into the equation, we started to talk about the possibility of stepping away from our life in Japan and moving to a country we hadn’t set foot in for nearly a decade; the United States of America.

Despite being US Citizens, having been out of the country for a decade and having no roots meant that we’d be starting fresh. . . . like really fresh. On a very basic level, this meant that we needed to decide where it is we were going to live. Initially, there was a pretty good list of places we were considering. Right at the top of the list were the cluster of states that make up New England. Seeing as how we were both born and raised in Massachusetts, it seemed like a good place to start. Then there were the states that we thought were interesting and so we threw them on the list. This included the likes of California, Washington and Florida.

Of all the states that we had been looking at, Florida was the stand-out. There are a few different reasons for that, but it really came down to the cost of living. While it was still more expensive than anywhere we’d lived in Japan, Florida didn’t come close to what it would have cost to live in one of the other states we were looking at; some of which [CA, MA & CT] were so expensive we would never have been able to afford the move. Then there were the jobs. . . . . there were none.

. . . . . enter Minnesota.

You may have noticed that Minnesota was not on the list of places we’d been considering. This is because Minnesota was not on our radar at all. Quite frankly, not only was it about as far away from the ocean as you could get, but it was cold. . . . . like really cold. Not something 2 people who just spent 8 years in the tropics before moving to place that would maybe get flurries from time to time were ready for. However, there were a few things that Minnesota had; jobs and a manageable cost of living. On top of that, my husband’s childhood friend had moved to Minnesota and that was the cherry on top!

It took a while, after the move, to get into the swing of living in Minnesota. Things were slow right off the start, but in about 3 years we managed to figure out how to cope with the winter and make the most out of the summer. It was 2020 when we finally seemed to have a grasp on making life in Minnesota manageable, but we all know what happened next.

We’re all familiar with the events that have been playing out sine early 2020, when the works turned on its head. I’ve no interest in rehashing those details during this discussion [‘cause we’ve all had plenty of that in the past 2+ years already], but I bring it up because of the role it played in the decision to move to Florida. Like so many others out there, the Global Pandemic that was Covid-19 shed a lot of light on the way things were happening; whatever those “things” happened to be. For us, among other things, it made it absolutely clear that the path we’d been on was not the right one. While we’d managed to spend the past 3 years distracting ourselves, when you strip everything away, Minnesota was not a place we enjoyed living.

Once we came to that realization, it was hard to see past it. This had us doing something very similar to what we’d done back in 2016 before moving to Minnesota. We started thinking about where we were and where it was we wanted to be. Although, this time, the conversations were a bit different. Of course, our circumstances were different than they had been when moving to the US from Japan. With a good grasp on what life in the United States entailed, we started developing a list of something we hadn’t given too much thought before; wants and needs. Though it had been a number of years since we’d had our last conversation about moving to what would ultimately turned out to be Minnesota, we slipped right back into the conversation as though it had happened only a few days before. With that came the discussion of Florida.

We spent a good amount of 2020 and 2021 really working through the idea of moving to Florida. We took a lot of time to think up different scenarios and ask ourselves the difficult questions to try and figure out whether or not this idea had legs. . . . and we came to the conclusion that it did. Not only did much of what we’d added to our list in 2016 still hold water, but we learned in the past few years that there are even more reasons that moving to a place like Florida makes sense for us; even if the move comes with a few challenges.

. . . . and that’s where we are right now. Like I said, the list of reasons that moving to Florida seems like the ride decision for us is a long one. So long, in fact, that it’s worth having a separate conversation altogether. That being the case, we’ll save the particulars of that conversation for another day. When all is said and done though, the idea of moving to Florida isn’t new to us and, quite frankly, it’s been a long time coming. While I’ll be the first to say that you can never really be sure whether the decisions you’re making in life are the right one until you’re waist deep in them, I do think that this is [if nothing else] a step in the direction where we wanted to be all along.

I suppose we’ll have to wait and find out!