Decision to Move Abroad Pt.1 — The Long Wait Begins

How One Holiday Made Us Realise It Was Time

The decision to move abroad didn’t arrive with drama or sudden clarity. It crept up on us during an ordinary holiday in L’Estartit — nothing fancy, no big plans, just a week away together.

Somewhere in that week, something I’d been avoiding thinking about caught up with me. Our boys are grown now. My job as their father — the day-to-day of it, the being-needed part — is done. Soon the house will be properly empty, and I realised I wasn’t comfortable just carrying on with the same routine once that happens. Staying still, doing the same things, in the same rooms, waiting for the years to pass — that wasn’t going to work for me.

I needed a change of environment. A proper fresh start, not a smaller version of the life we already had.

There’s a way of thinking about getting older that treats it as the beginning of the end — winding down, taking up less space, waiting. I didn’t want that. I wanted the opposite: for this stage to be a new beginning, not for me alone, but for the two of us — for me and Lesley, together, choosing what happens next instead of just letting it happen to us.

That’s really where this all started. Not with a spreadsheet or a property listing, but with that realisation, sitting somewhere in L’Estartit, that it was time.

We didn’t decide anything on that trip. We just noticed it. And once you notice a thing like that, it doesn’t really leave you.

The Trip That Started It

I’d never even heard of L’Estartit before 2016. We picked it, honestly, because we wanted the whole family together for a week and it fit our budget at the time. Nothing more romantic than that.

Getting everyone in the same place for a week wasn’t easy even then. Between work and everything else, it felt like we barely had time to breathe, let alone spend a whole week together. Our oldest had already moved to the States. Our other son was starting to talk about finding a place of his own with his girlfriend — no more chaos, as he put it. So that holiday mattered more than a normal one might have. It might have been one of the last times it was just us, together, like that.

And then L’Estartit itself did something I wasn’t expecting.

People there still take a siesta — something completely unthinkable in Malta. Families ate late in the evening, properly late, and thought nothing of it. We’d watch little children riding scooters alongside their parents in the evening, out and about, unhurried — something you’d rarely see back home. There was a sense of community to it. People seemed to actually know their neighbours, look out for each other, without it tipping into the kind of nosiness we’re used to in Malta, where “community” too often just means everyone knowing your business and having an opinion about it. I don’t enjoy that. I never have. In L’Estartit, it felt different — connected, but not intrusive.

That contrast is what stayed with me long after the holiday ended.

The Friends We Made

It wasn’t just the place — it was the people we met there too, some of whom we’re still in touch with today.

There was a woman who worked at a tourist agency called Panorama — English by birth but raised in L’Estartit since she was a child, so she moved between both worlds easily and spoke perfect English. She was enormously helpful to us that week. I’d rather not put her name out there without asking her first, but I’ll say this much: she became a genuine friend, not just someone who helped us book things.

We also got friendly with the owner of an Italian restaurant in L’Estartit called San Marino — which still makes me laugh a little, given that I’ve never been much of a fan of Spanish food itself. We still send each other the odd message on Facebook now and then.

Small things, maybe. But they’re part of why that first trip stuck with us the way it did.

The Conversation With Lesley

Back home in Malta, I couldn’t let go of the thought. If we wanted a proper fresh start, it wasn’t going to happen by staying where we were — it had to be somewhere new. It had to be Spain.

Saying that out loud to Lesley felt trickier than I expected. In my experience, women hold on to that connection with the children differently than men do — it’s harder, I think, to accept that they’ve properly flown the nest, especially after everything a mother puts into raising them. I wasn’t sure how she’d take the idea.

We were talking about the holiday, about how good it had been to have that time together, and how — even with the boys grown and gone their own ways — it was still the two of us, Lesley and me, right there. So I just asked her:

“Why don’t we move abroad?”

I honestly didn’t know what to expect. What I got was:

“Yes… maybe we should.”

That was it. That was the door opening.

Why Spain Came First

Long before any of this, I worked behind a bar in Malta. Over the years I met plenty of expats who’d made the move to the island themselves, and there was one line I heard from them again and again: Malta — you either love it or you hate it. No in-between.

At the time, I never really understood what they meant. It’s the kind of thing people say about a lot of places. But it stuck with me.

Our first trip to Catalunya was back in 2016 — L’Estartit, and over the years since, we kept returning: L’Escala, Besalú, Pals, Torroella de Montgrí. And somewhere in those visits, I finally understood exactly what those old customers of mine had meant. Spain took hold of us the same way. It wasn’t polite interest — it was the real thing, the kind you either feel or you don’t. For us, it was undeniable.

That’s why Spain was the country we seriously considered first, long before Torrebruna was ever part of the conversation.

What Comes Next

At this point, Italy wasn’t even on our radar — Spain was the plan, full stop. Part 2 picks up from that “yes,” and gets into the real research: cost of living, culture, what emigration actually involves, and everything else we needed to understand before this could become more than a nice idea.