Spain: An Odyssey

Our Journey to Spain (still ongoing) or Kafka’s Inferno

Photo by Álvaro Bernal on Unsplash

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Man: It feels like Britney and I have been trying to get to Spain for eons.

Really, it’s been over a year and a half or so. Honestly, I can’t even recall anymore exactly when the idea emerged. But I’m pretty certain we were discussing it before my dad died on June 2^nd, 2023.

There was never anything precisely important or spectacular, really, about Spain specifically, other than the fact that we’d both spent some time there. I’d been there a couple times, once for about six weeks in the spring of 2016 when I stayed in Valencia and Barcelona and then decided to walk 450 miles across northern Spain along El Camino de Santiago for four weeks. (One of the most incredible experiences of my life.)

The main thing was that we wanted to live outside of America. No, not because of Trump. (C’mon.) Because we wanted the American ex-pat outsider experience. How can you really know your own country if you haven’t lived in another one and seen it from that perspective first?

In my twenties I hitchhiked across America, drove across America, and took trains across America. Between 23 and 27 I must have crossed the United States at least a half a dozen times, maybe more. Train, bus, thumb, car. I read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 2005 at age 22 and took it very seriously and literally.

But then, in 2023, I was 40 years old, not yet married, sober 13 years, and ready to explore new horizons. I’d left New York City to care for my father. My dad was dying.

Britney was in a similar yet very different phase of transformation: Her 17-year-old son was leaving her home to live with his dad and was graduating from high school; She had met a man she loved and would marry; she was getting towards the end-zone with her beloved Border-Collie, Franky.

Wildly: Britney had been saying for years that when her son left home, when he was 18 and out of high school, she wanted to move to either of two places: The Bay Area or Spain.

I had lived in the Bay Area for a decade and owned a small home there, in El Cerrito.

Things changed in our lives. My father passed away. I moved into Britney’s house in Lompoc, an hour north of Santa Barbara, where I’d been living helping my mom with my father. We got married. We honeymooned in Morocco for two weeks.

And we started planning Spain. We researched and decided to hire an immigration lawyer. After much consideration—I’d been thinking about doing this for five years—we decided to sell my Bay Area house. The plan was to buy a new multi-unit in Lompoc, do a 1031 exchange.

But life intervened and—long story—my oldest friend (we met in the year 2000) who’s a real estate agent in Portland, Oregon, helped us find a multi-unit out here. A few months and a large loan for repairs and upgrades later and my house was sold and we’d bought a multi-unit in Portland.

All of this was for the sole purpose of possessing the savings and passive-income we’d need to get a “non-lucrative” visa (NLV) to live in Spain. It was a whirlwind of a few months, and during the sale and new purchase Britney traveled with her son to Japan, and the two of us did a big, epic driving trip through Canada and into Alaska.

Suddenly Britney had quit the job she’d had for 17 years, a job that was no longer serving her and which was badly dysfunctional. We planned the move into the bottom unit of our new multi-unit in Portland. The day before we planned to drive up to Portland from Lompoc in two cars—Britney with our white Prius and me with a U-Haul holding all our possessions we hadn’t sold in the garage sale—Franky, our beloved dog, who was about 15 years old, whom I had fallen in love with and walked every day for the past two years, decided his time had come. It was almost as if he were saying, Guys. I love you. But I’m old. I can’t go with you. It felt like he was passing the baton to me; Now it’s your turn to love and take care of Britney. It was a long, sorrowful, painful day. But he was ready.

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Once in Portland in early September, 2024, we realized the real work for Spain-prep would begin soon. After the home swap we had the savings required to move to Spain, and we would now be getting more passive income from two sources: Britney’s home in Lompoc which we planned to rent out, and the upper unit here in Portland…along with the lower unit once we were ready to move.

Oh, if only everything had been that simple, that easy. Is anything in life every easy? Do things ever really, truly go according to plan?

Not for me. Not for us.

First the problem was getting tenants for our upper unit and then for the Lompoc house. Long story short: We discovered that property management companies are trash. Britney, ever the entrepreneur and good with anything related to organization and money, went rogue and managed the places herself. (It was rockier than this but I’m giving you the short version.)

We found a great tenant for our upper unit. Then a tenant for her house in Lompoc. And we had the savings.

Next began the checklist of requirements. Previously, half a year before, we’d had to start with the most basic: Getting our passports renewed. We’d done that already. Next we had to go to the Portland DMV so that we could legally drive here, but also to prove that we were officially living here because, since we’d left Southern California, that meant we’d shifted from the Los Angeles Spanish Consulate to the San Francisco jurisdiction. That was good, because whereas L.A. made you go down in person to the appointment to show documents, S.F. allowed it to all be done via mail.

Next we had to get fingerprinted. FBI background checks. Britney joked that, due to my pre-sober past, something might come up. I chuckled, generally unworried.

Something, of course, came up.

As many of you know who’ve been following me a while: I am 14-plus years sober now. I stopped drinking in the fall of 2010, at the age of 27, which feels like both forever ago and also like yesterday. Well, before that time, let’s just say: There was a reason I quit drinking.

The FBI reports came back a week or two later. Hers was fine, clean, a blank slate.

Mine was not.