Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared on Live and Invest Overseas.
My personal live-and-invest-overseas adventure began with a weeklong tour of Ireland.
I had packaged and marketed the program to readers of the travel magazine I was publishing. I was to host the tour and invited my parents and 8-year-old daughter to come along. It seemed like a nice chance to combine business and pleasure.
I had, at the time, a clear personal agenda: I wanted to live in Europe.
Fortunately for me, this interest coincided with a professional opportunity.
A personal agenda meets a professional opportunity
The publishing company where I’d become a partner wanted to establish a presence in the EU.
This was the age of the Celtic Tiger, and Ireland was working hard to attract further foreign investment. Its Industrial Development Agency (IDA) was offering a corporate tax rate of 12%, grants for each Irish national employed, and other incentives to foreign companies that’d agree to establish offices in certain Irish cities.
This program got our attention, and a plan emerged. Our firm’s EU base would be in Ireland, and I’d move there to man it.
Stripped bare, here was the idea:
I’d leave my hometown (the city where I’d been born and had lived my entire life until this point), my family, my friends, Kaitlin’s school, and the stable business partner role with loads of upside I’d worked so hard for so long to achieve.
Step 2, I’d take off with my young daughter to build a whole new life in a whole new place where I knew no one and had no existing infrastructure of support.
Why not.
My first challenge was to decide where this new EU operation might be based. The Irish IDA had given us three options — Sligo, Galway, or Waterford — all places with local economies that could benefit from some foreign investment.
Thus the need for the tour-cum-scouting expedition I planned. I’d been to Ireland before but only on holiday and not to any of those cities.
Scouting options on a discovery tour
The first morning of that Discovery Tour, I sat at the head of a table in the meeting rooms of the Jury’s Hotel in Dublin with the 30 tour-goers, including my parents and my daughter, who I’d be traveling with for the coming seven days. We regrouped on the itinerary: Dublin to Wexford to Waterford, then one or two nights each in Cork, Sligo, Belfast, and, finally, back to Dublin.
As plans for the week were confirmed, I mentioned to the gentleman sitting to my right that I’d had trouble accessing my email from the hotel business center earlier that morning.
“I don’t want to take off without checking in with the office in Baltimore,” I explained, “but I can’t figure out how to access my account.”
“You should ask that fellow down at the end of the table to help you,” my new friend offered. “His name is Lief Simon. I think he knows about computers.”
Meeting a fellow scout
Lief Simon, I learned over the coming few days, a longtime reader of the travel magazine I was publishing, was in Ireland with an agenda something like my own.
Lief, too, was on the tour not as a tourist but a scout. Divorced from his wife of five years just two months earlier, Lief wanted to make another big change in his life. He wanted to move from Chicago, Illinois, where he’d been living and working while married, to somewhere in Ireland.
The final night of the tour, back in Dublin, Lief asked if I’d like to come along with him and some others to a nightclub across town. The bunch of us danced until closing time, made our way back to the hotel, shared quick hugs at the elevators, and wished each other well.
I returned to Baltimore to continue formulating my Ireland plan. Now that I’d seen more of the country, I had some opinions.
Sligo, on this country’s wild and windy northwestern coast, has a Wuthering Heights kind of appeal but didn’t seem like a place to try to build a business or raise a daughter. I decided I’d focus my research on Galway and Waterford.
A surprise call back in Baltimore
Then one afternoon the phone in my office rang.
“One of the guys from your trip to Ireland last month called to ask for your number.”
It was Patti, one of the girls who’d helped to organize the tour with me. “Which guy?” I asked.
“His name is Lief Simon. He called this morning to say he wanted to speak with you. I told him I’d have to check first.”
“Lief Simon?”
“The one we went dancing with on the final night in Dublin,” Patti explained.
“Ah … OK … Yes, go ahead and give him my number.”
Two hours later, when I returned from a meeting, I had a voice mail message:
“Hi. This is Lief Simon. We met in Ireland a couple of weeks ago. I’d like to take you to dinner. Give me a call.”
Lief came to Baltimore the following weekend and we had dinner. Two weeks later, I traveled to Chicago and we had dinner. Two weeks after that, Lief was back in Baltimore. He and I both needed to make return trips to Ireland, Lief to continue his property search, me to decide in which city I’d base the new office, Waterford or Galway.
“Let’s go back together,” Lief suggested.
And we did.
A life-changing proposal and a final decision
Our final night in Dublin this trip we stayed at a small bed and breakfast called the Charleston House just outside the city. The morning we were to fly back to the States, Lief made another suggestion.
“Maybe we should move to Ireland together,” he offered shyly. “I mean, what if we got married?”
And that became the start of our go-overseas plan.
How did we decide finally between Galway and Waterford?
Lief had identified a piece of property, Pouldrew House, he was interested in purchasing for his corporate retreat development idea, and it sat just outside Waterford City. Lief didn’t end up buying Pouldrew House, but Waterford became our new home.
Arriving alone in a foreign city
The first night I arrived in Waterford City as a resident I was alone. I’d taken the train down from Dublin, solo. Kaitlin and Lief were still in the States … packing, organizing, preparing.
Arriving at Waterford’s Heuston train station with eight oversized suitcases, two backpacks, a purse, and a laptop, I caught the attention of an Irishman and his wife.
The couple had sat across from me for the three-and-a-half-hour train ride from Dublin and took pity, I guess, on this young woman arriving late and alone in a new city with so much luggage. They offered to deliver me to the Granville Hotel, where I planned to stay.
They loaded me and my baggage into their van, and then we drove out of the train station and across the bridge into Waterford City.
It is this snapshot of the city, from that initial late-night arrival, that I carry with me all these years later.
Once a bustling port city with ships lining the quays importing and exporting to France, Spain, and beyond, Waterford when we appeared on the scene was forgotten and struggling.
But, at night, crossing the River Suir, with the lights of the waterfront Georgian townhouses twinkling in the harbor, Reginald’s Tower in the distance, standing guard over the city as it has since the start of the 13th century, you could imagine the place as it once must have been.
Arriving at night years ago, viewing the city for the first time from the bridge into town, Waterford appeared magical and full of promise.
