The Making of an (Almost) Expatriated American Couple

Part 1

   My wife Cathey and I have bought a home in the south of France and, when we retire, we plan to live there.

   We are not unreconstructed Francophiles. We don’t know the words to La Marseillez. German, Australian and South American wines make regular appearances on our table. And although our politics can best be described as moderately liberal, we are not retiring to France in order to spite the folks at Fox News. Nor are we in any way anti-American. We realize that it is only through the fortunate accident of our births that we have the opportunity to make such a choice.

   For Cathey, choosing to live abroad makes a certain amount of sense. She did the Icelandic Airways / backpack / youth hostel thing in Europe in the 1960s. She was born and raised in Texas – a state that has always considered itself a country separate from the United States. And she attended college in Mexico. So there’s a history there. On the other hand, until I met Cathey, I’d never strayed farther south from my New Jersey home than Washington, D. C. during my senior class high school trip and farther north than Boston…Harvard…also during my senior year.

   But Cathey and I love to travel.

   Early in our marriage, we camped on the rocky shores of Maine and boiled lobster on a Coleman stove. We power lounged in the Florida Keys and ate conch fritters and alligator soup in creaky shacks masquerading as restaurants. We swapped stories with Big Sur jade miners around a California campfire, watched the moon rise over the Willard Reservoir in Utah and sucked the juice from the heads of crawfish in the Louisiana back country.

   As the years have passed, we’ve opted more for comfort, flying to destinations instead of driving, nestling in boutique hotels in the French Quarter and in Aspen.

   In other words, we’ve done the Lower 48, with the possible exception of North Dakota, and we’ve traveled both on a shoestring and in style.

   We haven’t confined our joint explorations to the States, either. For our honeymoon, we drove from our New Jersey home to Mexico City. We’ve rented a beach house on Virgin Gorda and a condo on Isla Mujeres. But I’d never been across the Atlantic until we decided to visit Paris fifteen or so years ago.

   Contrary to American perceptions even in those days, we found Parisians warm and welcoming. We stayed in a small, commercial two-star hotel a few blocks behind L’Opera. Each day began with petite dejeuner in the hotel basement – fresh orange juice, hot coffee, a variety of breads spread with that wonderful sweet French butter and my most favorite of all – pain au chocolat. After breakfast, we’d take a brisk walk, cruising local food shops, choosing from among cheeses, pates, saucisson, whatever looked tempting. Clerks were always willing to cut off a sliver of this or a slice of that for us to taste. Wine to match, a fresh baguette, perhaps an outrageous dessert tidbit, then back to our room. But not to eat. These provisions were to be saved for our evening meal. It was winter, so we used the balcony for a fridge.

   By now, it was time for lunch. (Do you get the picture? We ate our way through Paris. Couldn’t be helped. Cathey is a gourmet cook and I learned to eat at an early age.) From one of the several guidebooks we’d cadged from friends and family, we chose the café of the day. We’ll return one day to Au Gigot Fin, a neighborhood joint with ambience straight out of a World War II French resistance movie, specializing in lamb in all of its incarnations, and the Café du Musee, in the Mairie not far from the Picasso Museum, where the proprietor serves his family’s wine in brightly decorated ceramic jugs to accompany the flakiest of fresh fish.

   Having eaten breakfast and lunch and provided for our dinner, the rest of the day was free for sightseeing – a stroll along the Seine, checking out the view from Sacre-Coeur, scratching our heads at I. M. Pei’s silly glass pyramid in the courtyard of the Louvre. We had the time of our lives and were ready for more.

   It should not be surprising then, that at about the time that we turned 50 and Cathey and I began planning for our retirement, we knew we wanted to continue our travels and where we wanted to travel was Europe. To be honest, we were looking for a certain…well…decadence. I’m not talking debauchery here, just a certain willingness to indulge in the finer things – an appreciation for a slower, measured, comfortable lifestyle.

   Western Europe. Definitely.

   Given Cathey’s delicately worded instructions concerning the shoveling of snow – “When we retire, I will never do that again.” – we were clearly not headed for Scandinavia. Not that I have anything against Scandinavia. There’s nothing quite like the Norwegian contemporary folk music scene. But regardless of the heat of the music, the probabilities of snow in winter are relatively high. No, we clearly were headed farther south.

   Where to begin? 

   We made a practical decision. We’d start our explorations as close as we could to the United States, then work our way east. First stop? Portugal. Specifically the Algarve, that southernmost region of Portugal along the Atlantic coast.

   Google became my best friend. +Algarve+real estate. +expatriate+Portugal. +bed and breakfast+Algarve. I carefully perused every website. I followed every link. I created a Portugal folder in Favorites that had over 30 websites bookmarked and they represented less than one-third of the sites that I hit. Websites with maps, climate charts, conversion tables for euros and for metric measurements and travel information joined the sites of real estate agents and property advisors based throughout the region.

   Cathey and I decided on a February visit. How warm does it get when it’s as cold as it gets? We booked our flights – TAP direct to Lisbon. We booked a room in a guest house in the Algarve – Casa Domilu (www.casa-domilu.com). We made appointments with real estate agents from the most promising of the websites and with a property advisor. And off we went.

   I found Lisbon disappointing. It seemed a sad, tired town, lacking the romance of Paris, the energy of Barcelona. We visited a couple of interesting museums – check out the National Tile Museum – and we ate some good food. We even watched the sun set over the port from a hilltop park packed with hippies passing joints and playing bongos. I swear to God. Even so, we were glad to hit the road headed south. And a good road it was, straight and true and 140kph all the way to the Algarve in our rented Fiat Punto – a sewing machine with wheels.

   On carefully landscaped grounds near the village of Benafil, Casa Domilu used to be a private home – palatial with swimming pools, tennis courts, a workout room, and a view of the ocean in the distance. Our room, in a small annex by the tennis courts, was spacious and comfy. A truly pleasant place to spend a vacation. But to live? No, thanks.

   First of all, Portuguese is a language from Mars. It sounds almost Spanish but it isn’t. It isn’t anything but Portuguese. Cathey, fluent in Spanish, was completely befuddled. I could never have learned it. Besides, the houses that we were shown were either in compounds, new and without character, or older and in need of extensive renovation. And as soon as you travel inland the land takes on an Iberian, low scrub, red dirt look that Cathey and I both found unappealing.

   So, we crossed Portugal off our list, decided to skip Spain and, in spring of the next year, headed for France.