Monday, July 5, 2010

Which faraway hill is greenest?

Did you ever wish you could escape?
Imagine being somewhere that they don’t talk about recessions or unemployment.  Is it even possible to be somewhere that doesn’t have the constant threat of national strikes hanging overhead like a great big cloud and don’t get me started on the weather.  Wouldn’t it be amazing to live in a place that has a nice climate?  I don’t mean sunshine three hundred and sixty five days a year (although that would be nice too).  No, I dreamt of somewhere with four real seasons – a hot summer, a colourful crisp autumn.  Imagine a white Christmas and then Spring bursting forward again with the promise of renewal and all things green and fresh. 
If you wished for all of the above – Hello!   Only I went one step further.  This time last year I upped sticks with FIVE children, one dog and a broad minded husband and we moved. 
If you’ve thought about moving but stayed put, it might interest or amuse you to hear about the antics and adventures we’ve experienced in the last twelve months.  Some of it has been plain sailing and we have had a lot of laughs.  But there have also been some very hard times and once or twice when I genuinely thought my heart would break in two but one thing it hasn’t been is dull.
Where to go was the first question.  The main concern for me was my children.  They range in age from a one-year-old monster to a teenager and then there’s the three in between.  The funny thing is the older kids had been very enthusiastic to go.  With hind sight now, I don’t think any of us really knew what we were talking about but we watched enough American TV to know we liked the look of their houses and they seemed like a nice enough bunch.  The rest of Europe didn’t hold much appeal as it was in economic gloom and anyway much of it has the same weather as Ireland so what was the point in going there?  And so we bought a map of America.  My husband’s business was in Florida but when we told the kids about the amount of alligators down there they weren’t so impressed.  It also had mosquitoes all year round and crime is almost as bad as Ireland and anyway it was just too bloody hot so Florida was crossed off the list early in the day. 

My older girls wanted to research California but my husband (the business brain in the family) informed us that, financially the state of California was in almost as much trouble as Europe (who would have thought, reading Hello and Grazia).  That said, the girls weren’t convinced, after all - the weather was seriously better and my youngest daughter wanted to live near the Jonas brothers.  In the end, I had the casting vote and I decided that it was just too far from Ireland.  The eight hour time difference would mean that I would be waking friends and family in the middle of the night looking for a chat and flying home would be an absolute nightmare.  That, in fact took the entire west coast and even Middle America off the ‘possible’ list and so we were left looking at the North East Seaboard.   New York?  Time Square and Fifth Avenue were nice.  Washington? We would have nice neighbours (back then everybody loved Barak).  Boston?  I had an idea that they liked the Irish (of course the Kennedys were a big Boston family) and Cheers was filmed there so obviously the pubs were good.  What more did a gal need?  A party town that liked the Irish – we had found our new home!