We picked Porto without ever standing in it

Lisbon was an accident.

I went for an Agile conference, of all things. I was trying to work out whether my fractional practice could stretch across the Atlantic, whether there was a version of this business that worked from Europe. That was the whole reason for the trip. Caroline was going to fly in at the end with our daughter and we would hang out for two days before coming home.

We did not come home on schedule. We extended, and we spent days just wandering the city with no plan at all.

Here is the thing that actually mattered, and it was not the food or the tiles or the light coming off the river, though I could write a whole post about the light coming off the river. It was that Caroline felt safe. She walked downtown at night with our daughter, just the two of them, and she was comfortable. If you have spent your adult life in the United States doing the math that women do about where they are and when, you understand what that is worth. I watched her stop doing the math.

We came back convinced. Lisbon was going to be the place.

Then we did the research, and the research disagreed

Not on Portugal. On Lisbon.

The more we dug, the more we kept describing something Lisbon is not. Slower. More walkable. Not a small town, we are not looking to disappear into the countryside, but not a capital city with a capital city's pace and a capital city's prices either.

We started talking to people online who had actually done it. Read everything we could find. And over a couple of months, without any single moment I can point to, Porto stopped being an alternative and started being the answer.

I want to be honest about how that felt, because I think this is the part people skip. It was not a decision. It was a settling. There was no evening where we looked at each other and said "Porto." There was a Tuesday somewhere in there when I noticed we had stopped arguing about it.

And we have still never set foot in it

That is the strange part, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

We have chosen a city on the strength of research, conversations with strangers on the internet, and a lot of reading. We are certain right now. We are also going on a scouting trip, and if something about the place does not land when we are standing in it, all of this could change.

That prospect sits differently with the two of us. I love change. Always have. Caroline does not, and the idea that a year of planning could turn on a week of walking around is genuinely scary for her.

So we did the thing planners do. We took the fear and turned it into structure. We are renting for at least two years. We are packing light and moving light. If Porto is not it, we will know inside a year, and we will not be trying to sell a house in a country whose language we are still learning in order to move ninety minutes down the coast. We are not locked in anywhere. That is not a hedge against Porto. It is a hedge against certainty, which is a different and more useful thing.

What last week actually looked like

We are thirteen months out. I can tell you exactly where we are, because I built the thing that tracks it and I am looking at it right now.

Foundation phase: three of fifteen. Twenty percent.

That is the real number. Not a rounded-up one, not the one I would pick for a brochure.

Here is what is actually behind it. The Wise account is set up. The euro conversion ladder is started, and last week added a rung to it: ten thousand dollars, converted. The document folder structure is built, which sounds like nothing and is the difference between finding a birth certificate in four minutes or four days.

Two things are sitting at almost-done, which is its own particular kind of annoying. The Portuguese NIF is four steps out of five. The NIF is the number that unlocks everything else in Portugal, and we are one step from having it, and we have been one step from having it for a bit. Passports are five of six.

And then a long column of nothing started. The monthly document pack. Two to three years of tax returns. The employer letter. The marriage certificate. Portuguese lessons. Rental research. Ten more.

The week the tire won

The plan was to close out the NIF and start the document pack.

We also had to buy out the lease on our car. I love that car. On the way to the dealership, at seventy miles an hour on Mopac, a large piece of a truck tire landed in the road directly in front of us.

We made it to the dealership. We signed the papers. And then the week went to a rental car and an insurance adjuster, and the NIF is still four of five.

This is the part nobody writes

If you read expat content you will find a lot of highlight reels. Sunlit terraces, visa approvals, keys to the new place. What you will not find is somebody publishing that they are twenty percent through the first of four phases and one of their two in-progress items has been one step from done for weeks.

I am publishing it because it is true, and because I would not trust me otherwise. I am building a tool to help people plan this move. If I only ever showed you the parts of my own move that are going well, you should assume the tool flatters you too.

Life does not pause politely while you reorganize it. Our daughter is looking at schools in the Northwest and starts college in the fall of 2027, and our timeline is built around her being settled first, because that is what you do. Clients need things. Cars get hit. The move gets whatever is left.

We are planners, and we know life happens. Those two facts are not in tension. They are the reason we started thirteen months out instead of six. Not because it takes thirteen months of work, but because it takes thirteen months of elapsed time for a plan to survive contact with the ordinary.

Part of what we are moving toward, if I am honest about the whole picture, is time. There are two more novels in the series I started, and they exist mostly as notes and intentions. Somewhere in the version of this that works, there is a porch in Porto and a morning with nothing scheduled in it.

We are a long way from that porch. We are three of fifteen.

Next week I am in Atlanta on client work, so I do not expect the move to move much. Which is itself the thing I want to write about: we both have access to the same plan, and it turns out where either of us is sitting does not really matter.

If you are somewhere on this same road, tell me where. I have been writing back to everyone, and the questions people ask have a way of becoming the next post.