Chapter 1: The First Chapter

Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Europe.
Europe who?
DID YOU JUST CALL ME A POO?
That is the sort of quality travel content you’ll find on this blog about two Southerners and their dog moving abroad.

I’m Sam. I’m a stock trader. Sitting on my right (your left) is my wife Rachel, a college professor of literacy studies. Lying upside down at our feet, in a miasma of Brie-induced flatulence, is Lily, our French Bulldog.

We’re ‘Muricans. I work remotely, managing money for a family office who has for some time been attempting to move me to their new headquarters in London. Rachel and I have always wanted to live overseas – destination unimportant – and we were over the moon when this opportunity presented itself in February 2020. Then the pandemic hit. As of this writing, COVIDs ’19-’21 are still swirling across the globe, and the United Kingdom is firmly entrenched in quarantine mode.

Many years ago, in December of 2020, we moved out of our apartment in Texas and came back to visit our families in South Carolina in preparation to move to London. We sold most of our possessions (not for the first time), got vaccinated, and paid for a vet to fill out the 2,835 forms needed to move a dog to another continent.

The months dragged on. Winter turned to spring; spring turned to summer; Selena Gomez released eight new albums. The UK kept pushing back their timeline to lift COVID lockdowns. Rachel and I were living in Clemson, SC in my dad’s house, which was being prepped to put on the market in July. We were already homeless and soon would be houseless.

Enough waiting, it was time to go. We had the last of innumerable conversations, and bought two one-way airplane tickets to Paris.

We sat Lily down and told her the good news. Rachel is convinced that Lily is smart enough to understand these conversations. I’m not quite so sure, as the dog is routinely startled by the sight of her food bowl appearing in the corner of the room where we keep her food bowl.