Planning a Working Holiday

In July I head to Virginia with my family, my first trip back to the U.S. since I left in March 2005. We’ll be in America for a little more than a month.

I’m excited and overwhelmed with thoughts of all I want to do, people I’d like to see, and how being “home” might feel after years of living in Europe.
 
A month sounds like a long time for a visit, but there’s a lot on our agendas. Naturally, we want to get together with friends and neighbors in Virginia and see if we can hook up with some of our far-flung siblings. We’re also planning to go to the beach, visit E’s mom in Florida, do back-to-school shopping, get glasses, visit a financial planner, and hit some craft stores.

High on our list of priorities is checking on our house, arranging for repairs if needed, and handling some landscaping issues on the property.

virginia plains

At this point we are planning to move back to Virginia in July 2008, but having reached that decision, we have another big one hanging over our heads. Will we or won’t we move back into our old house when we return? If we don’t, should we sell the house or hang onto it? We all love this house and it’s paid for but the location is so impractical. Located in a rural suburb, it’s about 60 miles from E’s office.

When we lived in our house, E got up at 4:30 a.m. every day to catch the first train heading to Washington, D.C. The combination of driving to the station, finding parking, riding the train, and walking to the office meant he had a two-hour commute ONE WAY. And getting up at 4:30 not only meant he was always tired, but that the kids never saw him in the morning and that he crashed shortly after they went to bed every night.

While I had the advantage of working from an office in my home, our kids attended a private school that was 20 traffic-clogged miles away, so I had a nasty commute of my own to deal with. Dropping them off every morning and picking them up each afternoon meant I spent almost 2.5 hours a day in the car.

washington DC

Since moving to Belgium, E has lived 15-20 minutes from his office and the kids are 10 minutes from school and ride the bus. It’s given us a tremendous quality of life here—reduced our stress levels and given us time together as a family.

So when we’re in the U.S. in July, we intend to check out the schools and real estate market close to Washington, D.C., wondering all along whether moving to a much smaller and more expensive home in an urban area with a dynamic and very competitive culture will be an improvement over what we had before.

We’re also toying with the idea of moving closer to E’s office but not all the way to the Washington metro area. Maybe we’ll select a new school for the children. Maybe E can telecommute two days a week. As retirement and college loom on the distant horizon, financial issues are on our mind as well.

July won’t be a holiday but it will be a month of reunions, decisions, shopping, planning, driving, relaxing, and culture shock. However it all plays out, I know I’ll have plenty to blog about in August!

March 27, 2007

© 2007 Veronica McCabe Deschambault. All rights reserved.