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.