That
is the question we were asked continuously when we first arrived in July of
2017, and are still being asked over two years later. Sometimes the tone of the
person asking the question was simple curiosity, but occasionally it was almost
disbelief, as in ‘What in the hell would you want to come here for!?” Apparently some folks are not too happy with the area for whatever reason, but I imagine
that is probably true wherever people live. It was hard to give a simple answer
so we’d usually just say “the climate” and let it go at that. But there was a
lot more behind it than climate. To answer the question fully we need to go
back a bit in time.
Maybe
in some other post I’ll get into how we met and what led up to what but for now
I’ll just say that Maribel is Peruvian; that she arrived in the USA/Wisconsin
in June, 2006 on a fiancé visa and we were married the following September. Two
years later several circumstances pretty much dictated that we move to Peru.
Nearly ten years later those circumstances were resolved. Maribel loves her
country but she loves the United States more. To this day we still debate about
which one of us first broached the subject of returning to the States but it
wasn’t long after before we were actively planning.
I
am a planner. I put titles on grocery lists. I do everything possible to negate
Murphy’s Law. So I started working on an Excel spreadsheet. The Y axis had
every possible criterion we could think of…climate, cost of living, crime rate,
days of sunshine, days of precipitation, ethnicity, average family income,
access to major airports, expressways and major cities, and probably a dozen
more that I can’t remember. The X axis on the top row contained the contender
cities. With the criterion established I began Googling each of them. Without
getting into the detail, I’ll just say that 75% of the returns pointed to the
south east, and drilling down farther centered on the Chattanooga area. The
added pluses that we hadn't thought about were the mountains, forests, Civil War sites and two-hour access to Nashville
and Atlanta. I will always be a Wisconsinite at heart but those brutal winters
were not something either of us wanted to face again.
Having
decided on the area I contacted realtors in Chattanooga and other cities within
a one hundred-mile radius and told each what our basic requirements were. In
Wisconsin our house had been in a semi-country setting and we wanted that same setting if
possible. While the realtors were looking Maribel and I were also searching
realty sites, and developed a list of specific houses that looked promising.
With
all of that going on, I was also busy contacting bankers. Interestingly, none
of the bank’s on-line mortgage applications were set up to handle Peruvian
addresses or Spanish bank names. In one case I actually rewrote the banks
application to accommodate the issues. And it turns out that we actually had
the pre-approval letter from that bank even before leaving Peru.
When
we’d picked a date to leave I bought plane tickets, booked a hotel and reserved
a rental car. The specific realtor we were working with had made viewing
arrangements for all of the homes we had selected in her area. Packing was a
challenge…what to take and more importantly what to leave, because we were not
planning on returning, at least for a long time.
To
finish this, we arrived at the Chattanooga airport, picked up the rental car,
drove to the hotel that would be our ‘home’ for the next thirty-eight days, met
the realtor the next morning, and ultimately bought the second house we looked
at that day. And that is why we chose this location.
This
post went longer than I expected it to. Maybe next time I’ll write about the
differences we’ve seen/experienced between the Northwest Georgia area and
Wisconsin. Or it could be that I’ll write about my view on the origin of the
universe. We’ll see.
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