The Bad

There's no getting around the fact that I really wanted to go to England. When Luke first got the job back in March I tried to talk him out of it. "Oh, it will be so gloomy," I said. But the job seemed so awesome that we both decided to move forward and I started to get excited about England. After all my favorite book of all time is "The Kings and Queens of England." So now I would finally be able to explore all the castles and the history. And we would still be close enough to France to be able to practice our french. So I spent 9 months getting excited about moving only to have it come to an end...almost like a stillbirth.  Sure, there will be good things about living in Colorado. But this post is about the bad. The things we gave up. The dreams I had that will never be...

1. Experiencing a new culture in England. If living in Switzerland has taught me anything it is that I really don't like to travel. I don't like to be a tourist. I have found that living somewhere is a unique experience that you cannot get as a tourist. I was looking forward to experiencing this again in England. Not just visiting England, but living in England. 

2. Becoming fluent in French. Yes, I can take French courses here in Colorado. And I am planning on doing so. But there are not many native speakers here and being so far from France is a huge disadvantage to becoming fluent. 

3. Jack attending the multi lingual school. The first thing I looked into when Luke accepted his new job were schools. And I fell in love with this school that would have been 5 minutes from our house. It is a European School and their focus is turning out multilingual students. Jack would have started kindergarden with 50% english and 50% french instruction. Then, by the time he was in middle school, he would take another language course so that by the time he graduated high school he would be fluent in three languages. There is nothing like that in Colorado. 

4. Jack and Lily having cute british accents. :-)

5. Lost all our stuff. Yup. Had to donate two years of our life away. 

6. Lost several thousand dollars shipping our stuff from Switzerland to UK. Ouch! Not only did we lose everything and then have to re-buy it. But we even had to spend our own money to ship our things from Switzerland to the UK. Double whammy.

7. Lost our plane tickets. We all had one way tickets back to London that we can't use anymore.

8. Missed out on having a carless life for a while. I was really looking forward to buying a bike and bike trailer and being without a car for several years. I loved that in Switzerland I could walk Jack to school, I could walk to several parks, I could walk to the grocery store and post office, I could walk to the train station. I hate cars. I hate car seats. I really was looking forward to a car free life for a while. 

9. Missed out on Scotland, Ireland, Wales, etc, etc, Yep. No England, means no weekends in France, no weekends in Scotland, no trip to Norway.