The Prelude

I love learning. I think I’ve always been that way. I remember in college meeting someone who was basically a career student and thinking how awesome that would be. These days I find I like being a student of life. I want to know more about people and history and culture. Specifically, I’ve spent most of my life in the US but traveling in Europe has appealed to me for a long time.

I met my main sweetie Billy at a board gaming convention in November 2012, and we’ve been together since then, enjoying a lot that life has to offer. We talk about things we want to do, from playing and designing games together (boardgames and phone/tablet games) to moving to another country and traveling. We’ve spent many hours talking about moving and where we want to move to. In our quest we’ve tossed around places like Canada, Western Europe (France, Germany, and the Netherlands mostly), and Japan as possible places for relocation.

We’ve also traveled around the US a bit in the past few years, mainly because of a bid we were part of for a traveling convention (where you go to other conventions to encourage people to vote for you for a future iteration). From the bid, in the last three years I’ve traveled to San Diego, Spokane, Portland, Kansas City, and Tempe in the US.

We spent a lot of 2017 preparing and choosing. We decided to go to WorldCon in Helsinki, Finland in August as a combined vacation and scouting trip, and we visited Seattle and Vancouver BC in May.

By the time the August trip came around, we were pretty certain that our choice was the Netherlands, for a number of reasons. It’s been on Billy’s radar for quite a while, as his family came to the US from the Netherlands, settling in Holland, Michigan (Go Dutch!); we’re both enamored with the transit infrastructure in Western Europe, and plan to not own a car once we move over; we’ve been watching the news and researching Dutch culture and history, to get an idea of how they deal with things, and it’s very blunt and logical, which appeals greatly to us as well.

In August we spent a week in Helsinki (which we liked), then flew to Amsterdam and spent a few days there, enjoying the canals and trains. Then we visited ‘s-Hertogenbosch, more commonly known as Den Bosch, to visit a boardgaming friend and his family. While there, we popped over to Eindhoven to check out the Hovenring by bicycle. From Den Bosch, we took the trains to Paris and spent our last 2 days there, before flying back to the US. It was a fabulous trip and I plan to recap it for you all in the future, with pictures and food reviews. 🙂 It also solidified our interest in moving to the Netherlands. We went back in December of 2017/January of 2018, another trip which I will recap with pictures and details another time.

So yes, in this blog you will hear about all the little adventures I’m having all the time, but the big one looming over all right now is the move to the Netherlands. Yes, that’s right, I’m planning on moving to the land of windmills and cheese! 😀