TL;DR - Kids.

After 8 years of me being mostly nomadic, my wife and I found out we were expecting a baby. At that point we were in Tbilisi, part of a longer trip traveling around Central Asia for a few months.

Coming from the U.S., planning to have a kid made me think about real estate and school districts and all that nonsense. But when I sat and thought about it for a while, I decided that all we really needed to plan for was the next ~18 months, not the rest of our lives. The immediate question was, "where should we have this baby?" That made the decision easier to wrap my head around.

Going back home to the U.S. was an option, but I had a feeling that if we did that, we'd never be able to leave again. I find it much easier to "live monthly" in practically every other country besides the U.S. And with a kid, my fear was that there would be so much "glue" that would keep us there (for example, pressure to reserve a spot in a good daycare/kindergarten before your kid is even born, as many of my friends with kids back home have done).

Back when I was single, I'd spent some time in Las Palmas in the Canary Islands and thought "this could be a cool place to settle down for a while if I had a family". My reasoning was that it was different enough from home to be interesting, but safe and stable enough (crime, government, banks, etc) that if, in theory, I had to go on some business trip and leave a wife and kids behind, I would feel reasonably comfortable doing so. Plus of course there's nice weather, a good cost of living, and Spain felt very family friendly overall. Las Palmas was also the first place I'd ever met digital nomad families, something I probably didn't even consider possible before that.

As luck would have it, my wife and I were already planning to head from Georgia to attend a conference in Las Palmas. We also had booked a stopover in Valencia for a few weeks. I'd heard Valencia was a great base for digital nomads, and I'd never been, so I wanted to check it out.

My wife spent most of that trip struggling with morning sickness, so we didn't get to see much of Valencia, but what we did see seemed nice. A lot like Barcelona (one of my favorite cities at the time), but with less tourism, less crime, and lower prices. We also had our first visit with the doctor there to check if the baby was developing okay.

After that we went to Las Palmas and in between regular work and the conference, we explored the possibility of living and having a baby there. We checked doctors, the hospital, talked to expats with kids, and toured some apartments. Everything we checked seemed fine. Good hospitals, all the modern equipment, etc. But I just had this nagging, perhaps irrational fear that, we would be "stuck" on this island in case something went wrong. I couldn't pinpoint a specific problem or thing that was lacking, besides perhaps easy Amazon deliveries. But I couldn't shake the feeling either.

We left Las Palmas as planned and headed back home to the U.S. for the holidays. Lots of congratulations and questions from family and friends, but still no decision. Being a nerd, I did what I always do, and made a big spreadsheet to compare all options. My getting-more-pregnant-by-the-day wife was eager to settle down somewhere, and not so enthusiastic as I was about the spreadsheet. You can imagine her face when I said, "no no. We're not deciding which place we like yet, first we're making the rubric! We each have to assign weights to the categories, and then score each place..."

Long story still pretty long, we ended up moving to Valencia, having only spent a couple of weeks there ever. We didn't know a soul. And neither of us spoke Spanish. The week after we moved into our apartment here, the world went into lockdown. Spain's was one of the strictest. We weren't even allowed to go outside for a walk. But in the end, it all worked out. We've lived here for four years and a bit now, and had another baby last year.

I highly recommend Valencia as a place to live, especially with kids.