We didn’t just wake up one day and decide to leave the UK and move to a tiny island in the Caribbean, likewise we didn’t plan a big move abroad for years in advance. I guess our story is unique in that we got offered an amazing opportunity and we couldn’t really turn it down.
If you want to know where it all began, I suppose the idea started back in 2010 when we got really into scuba diving and we made some amazing friends on Tenerife who owned a dive centre. After spending as much time as possible on holiday there, we were planning to move to the Mediterranean and embrace island life. For one reason or other things didn’t quite work out, our Friends decided to retire to the south of France, the economy became unstable and with it our dream of island life evaporated.
Us in Tenerife 2010!
We accepted that some things are not meant to be and started building a life in the UK embracing the normality of get married, buy house, get pets. But for me it never seemed to be quite enough I was forever looking forward to the next holiday, so I guess the desire to move never really disappeared.
The aspiration for long term travel started sometime in 2015 after returning from our three week long honeymoon in Jamaica. I had this feeling I couldn’t shake the ‘life’s too short so get-out-there-and-see-stuff’ feeling. I decided it was a phase and pushed it out of my mind, but it kept creeping back in there, the what if and the will I regret not doing this.
That was when I started looking at travel blogs I was in awe, but I was not on my own, I had a husband, a nice house, a car and 2.4 cats to think about. Again, I pushed travel to the back of my mind instead I got a new job, decided to further my veterinary nursing career and threw myself into home improvements.
By the end of 2016 I had itchy feet again and those 2-week holidays weren’t curing it. I had never been the person who got to the end of their 2 weeks away and was ‘ready to go home’. My parents were always saying this when I was a kid we would get to about the 10th day of a trip and my mum would start saying ‘I’m ready to go home now’ or ‘I can’t wait to get in my own bed’ or ‘wont it be nice to be home’.
‘Don’t live the same year 75 times and call it a life’- Robin Sharma
I had made up my mind and I decided to broach the subject with Lewis. Now, Lewis is a bit of a home bird, his initial response was ‘not another holiday!’ not quite what I had in mind, but I had planted the seed. Lewis took a bit more persuading and the eventual threat of ‘well if you don’t want to come travelling for a year I’m going alone’ for him to give in agree to come. That was May 2017 and so the saving for our gap year adventure began. The more we saved the more excited we got until eventually we saved up over £15,000 and were intending to leave on our gap year trip in October 2019 but fate had other plans.
During 2018 one of our good friends, a fellow veterinary nurse, had made the leap to move to the Caribbean around July she posted on Facebook that there was another veterinary nurse job going. I replied with the usual ‘ooo that’s tempting’ and thought nothing more of it until she replied saying I should apply and what’s the worst that could happen. I sat and thought about it and said to Lewis there’s another job going in St. Kitts he asked if I was going to apply and I said I think I might!
Fast forward to October 2018 and we were being flown out for an on-island interview and it was incredible, the people were lovely, the job sounded great, the island was a paradise! Lewis already started making plans to move before I got offered the job and luckily I did or I think he would have moved without me! We decided to leave the UK and began planning and packing up our lives to move in February 2019 and become British expats in the Caribbean at only 30 years old!
Black Rocks, St Kitts
It’s true what they say there will never be a perfect time to leave and we are testament to that. We were in the middle of a huge house project when I got offered the job and later in 2019, we will be missing two of our nephews starting secondary school, Lewis’s brothers 40th birthday, my Dads 60th birthday and my parent’s 40th Wedding anniversary! But at the same time, it is also the perfect time because it surely can’t get any worse than this right?
We decided on a 2-year trial and the round the world gap year would wait until then BUT from our new location we will be so much closer to the USA, Mexico, South America and of course the other Caribbean islands and we will have the opportunity to explore some wonderful places that are now on our doorstep.
Have you made the decision to pack up and leave your old life behind or are you planning on doing so? Let us know in the comments!
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