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In November 2023 Cindy, Charlie and I flew to Valencia for two weeks with one goal — figure out if we could actually live there. We loved it. Great football, great food, great city. We visited Barcelona and Madrid. Met with a visa agent. Started the paperwork. Ticked every box.
Then reality hit.
The visa structure didn't fit our business model. It wasn't impossible, but it was complicated in a way that felt like we'd be spending the first two years fighting bureaucracy instead of actually building. For a family already mid-leap, that wasn't the move.
Real Madrid v Valencia @ the new Bernabéu
So there we were. House sold. Five bedroom family home — gone. The three (five with dogs) of us squeezed into a two bedroom apartment, boxes everywhere, no country to move to, and a 11 year old who'd been promised an adventure.
I genuinely cannot tell you how Thailand came up.
I wish I had a better story. A sign, a conversation, a moment of clarity. But the honest version is that one of us mentioned it, neither of us remembers who, and within 48 hours we were deep in a YouTube rabbit hole that lasted weeks.
Hua Hin kept coming up. Every search, every forum, every "best places to live in Thailand" video. We didn't know anyone there. We'd never been. No contacts, no community, no safety net.
We just looked at each other one day and said — why not.
So we booked it.
Then we sold everything. The house was already gone but we cleared out everything else — the car, the furniture, anything that didn't fit in a bag. If it couldn't come with us, it went.
April 2025. Three of us standing at the train station with 11 bags between us, about to start something we couldn't fully explain to anyone, including ourselves.
The next chapter was waiting.
That was eleven months ago.
We're still here. Hua Hin, Thailand. And every expat we meet who's lived and travelled around Thailand says the same thing — you've found the best place in the country. We're starting to believe them.
Charlie plays football six days a week. He's found his people, found his groove, and the kid who was promised an adventure is living one. Cindy works from home, deep in AI development, building products and processes that didn't exist a year ago. I run SportsFX from a laptop, play padel most days, and start most mornings with an ice bath and a steam room.
Cost of living is down 50%. Sunshine is up considerably.
Was it the right call? There's not much to complain about. We're happy. We're settled. And the next chapter — Dubai — is already taking shape.
If you want to follow where this goes, I write about it every few days. The businesses, the move, homeschooling on the road, and what it actually looks like to build a life you don't need a holiday from.
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