The Life We Wanted to Come Home To
Everyone asks why we moved to Spain.
The answers they expect are sensible ones. Sunshine. Healthcare. A slower pace of life. They all played their part. I’ll happily admit that I’m solar powered, so three hundred days of Mediterranean light certainly didn’t hurt.
But those answers only explain why Mallorca made sense.
They don’t explain why it became home.
Nothing about the life we left behind was broken.
We had built our dream home in the Pacific Northwest, designing every room from the ground up. It was the kind of house we’d imagined for years, and seeing it finally come together felt like proof that hard work really could become something tangible.
Our careers were successful by nearly every measure. I divided my time between remote work, the Seattle office, and the North Atlantic Ocean, somehow fortunate enough to pursue two careers I genuinely loved. My wife, Jenny, was building a new chapter of her own, transitioning from a career as a hairstylist into functional nutrition, creating a business that reflected who she had become.
We were raising Coco in a home that represented years of sacrifice, ambition, and countless small decisions made over the course of our lives. It wasn’t just where we lived. It was the life we’d spent years building.
Leaving wasn’t an escape.
It was a question.
What if success wasn’t something you accumulated?
What if it was something you experienced?
Ordinary Magic
I don’t remember the exact moment Mallorca began to change us.
I remember dozens of ordinary ones.
The woman at the bakery quietly setting aside a carrot muffin for Coco before we’d even reached the counter.
Ordering coca de trampó at the market until the familiar faces behind the stalls stopped asking what we’d like and simply smiled in recognition.
A bartender greeting us after we’d been away for a few weeks with a grin and, “¿Cuánto tiempo?”
Our hesitant Spanish.
Their patient laughter.
The cathedral bells marking the hours more faithfully than any notification ever could.
None of those moments were remarkable on their own.
Together, they slowly rearranged our understanding of what a good life looked like.
A Story Already Unfolding
For centuries, people have arrived on this island.
The Phoenicians anchored here. The Romans settled. The Moors transformed it, leaving behind winding streets, hidden courtyards, ingenious waterways, and a rhythm of life that still lingers beneath the limestone and sea salt. Kings, merchants, sailors, pilgrims, artists, and dreamers have all passed through these same narrow lanes.
I don’t say that because I imagine our family belongs in the history books.
Quite the opposite.
What moved me was the thought that we could quietly become part of a story that had already been unfolding for hundreds of years.
To buy bread on streets where generations before us had done exactly the same.
To watch Coco grow up believing these ancient walls weren’t museum pieces, but part of ordinary life.
To belong, however modestly, to a place that had never needed us, yet somehow welcomed us anyway.
In Love With Repetition
People often imagine that moving abroad is an act of constant adventure.
In truth, we’ve fallen in love with repetition.
The same cafés.
The same walks.
The same market stalls.
The same conversations.
The familiar has become extraordinary.
Sometimes, just to remind ourselves how fortunate we are, we become tourists again.
We’ll book a night in one of our favorite hotels on the island, wander through Palma with no agenda, sit beside a pool while visitors arrive for their long awaited holiday, and quietly smile to ourselves.
Tomorrow they’ll board flights home.
We’ll walk back to ours.
Those little escapes aren’t about pretending to be somewhere else.
They’re gentle reminders that this is the place we once dreamed about from thousands of miles away.
We still work hard.
There are deadlines, responsibilities, long days, and plenty of ordinary life woven between the beautiful parts.
But work no longer feels like the reason we’re alive.
It supports the life we’re trying to build instead of replacing it.
The Crossing
A few weeks ago, I sailed from Mallorca to Sardegna.
It was the first time I’d left the island in nine months.
As the coastline slowly disappeared beneath the horizon, something unexpected happened.
For most of my life, leaving had always meant possibility.
This time it felt like loss.
It surprised me how reluctant I was to watch the island disappear behind the stern.
Somewhere during those quiet months, without announcing itself, Mallorca had stopped being the place we lived.
It had become the place I longed to return to.
I’ve come to believe there’s a simple measure of a good life.
When your journey ends, are you excited to go home?
For years, I traveled because I loved leaving. Now I travel because I love coming back.
Not because Mallorca is perfect.
No place is.
But because somewhere between the bakery, the market, the cathedral bells, long conversations over coffee, and evenings that never seem in a hurry to end, we found something we’d been chasing for years without realizing it.
Not a different country.
A different way of living.
And, perhaps for the first time, a life we’re genuinely happy to come home to.
Written from Palma, Mallorca.
