Lifestyle, food and drink, and our family life and travel adventures.
I have been lucky enough to visit the USA quite a few times in my life and I love it so much. I haven’t been for years now though and I would love to go again and take my daughter. When I and my (now) husband went travelling after university we went to New York, San Francisco and LA, and I have also been to Florida quite a few times with family.
I’m desperate to take Ava to Florida and Disney World and I really hope we can do that in the next couple of years. I love it myself as an adult; I think it just always feels so magical and the rides are great so I know Ava would love it.
But I have also always really wanted to live in America for a year. Since I was young I have particularly wanted to live in New York for a year but there are now so many other places I would love to live for a considerable amount of time.
I would love to make a permanent move abroad one day but I don’t really like the idea of moving away from all of our family permanently or taking Ava away from them all, so a year abroad would be amazing.
I just love so much about the USA – how much the geography varies from place to place, the stunning and varied scenery, the friendliness of the people. I would love to one day do a big road trip in a motorhome too; I think that would be incredible.
I’ve only been to New York once, unfortunately, but I loved it just as much as I imagined I would and I can’t wait to go back one day. Obviously, it is a massively touristy place but I would love to live there for a little while and enjoy the city as a local. There is just so much to see and do and I would love to just be able to explore the less touristy places more and really take in the buzz of the city.
I think it would be really cool to live somewhere like Brooklyn for a few months. I think it would be so different to living anywhere else and I would love to experience it for longer than just the length of a holiday.
As I said I have been lucky enough to go to Florida quite a few times now and I love so much about it. The big draw is obviously Disney World but there is so much more to the sunshine state too. I would love to live there for a year or so with my family and really get to see it all and have a really chilled and fun year there.
We love visiting Wekiwa Springs whilst we are there. It’s so beautiful and you can swim in the clear waters and hire kayaks and head down the river and enjoy a picnic in the sunshine on the banks of the spring. You can even camp there which would be amazing. When we are in Florida we always spend a day here so I would love to take Ava and enjoy it together.
I also love the Sarasota area and the stunning beaches so I would love to live somewhere like that for a month or too to enjoy the beaches and weather and then for longer in Orlando to enjoy the hustle and bustle, Disney World and all the great restaurants there. I always just feel so chilled when I’m in Florida – I love stupid things like just going to the supermarkets there and browsing for ages!
I’ve been using Zumper to have a look at places to rent in Orlando, just to get an idea of what could be possible. It would be such a brilliant experience for us all to spend a year somewhere like that as it is so different from anything here. I think it would be so fun to live in an apartment in or near Orlando, and especially if there was a pool! Rent wise, it’s not the cheapest but it also seems possible to rent somewhere at a similar price to our mortgage here, so if we could get someone to rent our house for a year it could work, especially as I could continue to work whilst we were there.
According to Zumper, one of the most affordable areas to rent in Orlando is West Colonial where the average rent is around $825 a month and it still looks like you can get really nice properties for rent there. We would, of course, research any area more if we were going to rent but it’s great to be able to look at what is available and what kind of costs we would be looking at.
Zumper is great because you are able to apply online which would be necessary for us, and you can filter by location, price range, bedroom count and more and you are also able to set an alert to get notifications when a new listing is posted.
Santa Barbara has always looked so beautiful to me and I think it would be an amazing place to live for a year or so as a family. I have a friend who moved there from somewhere else in America and it always looks like they have such a brilliant quality of life for his family and particularly the kids. The beaches are stunning, the weather is perfect and it all seems so relaxed and lovely.
If we lived there for a few months or so we could all learn to surf, spend our days outdoors, eat fresh fish and be really healthy and walk lots and I think it would be incredible.
We spent a few days in San Francisco in our early twenties and we both really loved it. There is so much to see and do and it would be such a great place to experience as a local and see all the bits and hidden gems that you don’t get to know about as a tourist.
We would, of course, visit all of the traditional tourist spots like The Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf and Alcatraz but also just enjoy the beautiful city and all it has to offer.
I have never been to Canada but it is one of the places that I really feel like I could live there, whether just for a year or maybe even longer term. It always looks like an absolutely stunning place with so much to see and do, but also just a really good place to be a resident and bring up a family.
I would love to do all of the more adventurous things the country offers – loads of walking and hiking, visiting Niagra Falls and the lakes, as well as just exploring the cities and varying landscapes. The only thing that doesn’t appeal so much is the weather which is probably a bit worse than ours in the UK and I would really want to move somewhere warm if I was going to, but I do think it would be a wonderful place to live one day.
I love the USA so much and I can’t wait to go back again as soon as possible and take Ava. I would so love it if we were able to live there for a year or so and really experience a very different way of life to the one we have in the UK and have loads of time to enjoy it and explore a new place.
Would you ever want to live abroad even for a little while?
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Welcome to Birds and Lilies! I'm Lou: mother, blogger and freelance writer. This is my lifestyle blog, where I talk about motherhood, infertility and IVF, beauty, my love for food and wine, as well as my thoughts about stuff, and our real-life and travel adventures.
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