4. Appeal

New Zealand is a beautiful country of nice people with a range of
climate zones where we have enjoyed traveling.

I’m not sure how this ended up at the bottom of this list.
Perhaps because it’s the hardest to quantify. Still, this was
to be an adventure for us and we wanted to move someplace we wanted to
live. We probably didn’t flat-out exclude any place that
didn’t sound exciting. Certainly Albuquerque was not at the
top of our initial list back when we ended up there. Still, we had to
admit that given the amount of effort required, the move was less
likely to become a reality if we weren’t excited by the
prospect.

Call us silly, but climate had a role in the appeal. We grew up in
California, and had lived the past 12 years in the high desert of New
Mexico. We had to admit to ourselves that we just might be addicted to
sun. We weren’t keen to have extremes of gray or snowy
weather, though we’d learned that heat wasn’t too
much of a barrier for us.

Conclusion

With these criteria, our first brainstorm list of countries from Costa
Rica to Indonesia to Ireland was systematically whittled down to just a
few countries.We had a pretty good sense of where we would most likely
have a successful adventure. And while we can pretend that we were in
control of the
final choice, in a way New Zealand chose for us. In evaluating
immigration criteria of countries on the short list, we learned that NZ
offered an immigration status of Migrant Worker that did not require us
to find work before we arrived. While we hadn’t previously
considered this factor, once we realized it was an available option it
became the decision-maker. Rather than being tied to a specific job in
a specific location before we arrived, we could instead settle the same
way we had moved to New Mexico. We would have the freedom to travel
around, evaluate potential cities and jobs and choose the combination
that worked best for us.

Now that we are here, not every detail has turned out to be exactly as
advertised, but that’s a story for another day.