At the end of my Arizona to Sydney post, I said meeting my husband was a story for another time. This is the story that comes before that one: how I ended up on this side of the world at all.

The short version is that I did it on a whim. About two months after deciding I wanted to live in Australia, I had sold my house in Phoenix (with a 3% interest rate, hello pre-covid impulse buy), sold my car, and moved my daughter and me into a nearly empty house in Sydney with 8 suitcases between us.

Fair warning, I'm about to get real personal here. But we're internet friends now, and as far as I'm concerned, that's binarily binding.

The long version starts with a guy.

The catalyst

In July 2023, I started a great job. A month later, through that job, I met an Australian guy. We were both in a rough place at the time, and I fell hard. Not a little crush. I was all the way in, fully convinced he was my twin flame, and he was just as convinced I was his. He was in Sydney and I was in Phoenix, so it was the kind of thing that happens in time zones and the occasional visit. We saw each other a handful of times over the next several months.

It didn't work out, and we called it quits before I'd ever been to Australia. But I wouldn't be here without him. He was the catalyst for this whole change of life, and I'm genuinely grateful to him for that.

Two weeks that changed everything

In April 2024, I decided I wanted to see Sydney anyway. I talked a friend into coming with me, and we booked a cute little Airbnb about an hour outside the city. I didn't want the tourist version. I wanted to know what it felt like to actually live there.

So we wandered around Newtown, climbed the Harbour Bridge, and mostly just enjoyed being off parenting duty for a while. Our kids were happily parked with their grandparents.

I'd booked two weeks. My friend could only stay for one, which left me the second week on my own. That week turned out to be the important one. Lots of quiet time. A few off-the-record cigarettes. And an Airbnb host who, somewhere along the way, became a close friend.

By the time I flew home, I'd made up my mind. I wanted to give Aussie life a real shot.

A house in a market locals can't crack

When I got home, I sat down with my daughter and floated the idea of moving to Australia. She was on board. So I bought another plane ticket and went back in mid-June to find us somewhere to live.

If you don't know the Sydney rental market, it's the kind of impossible where most locals can't find a house. My Airbnb host turned friend took me around to open house after open house until I walked into one I loved.

That's where the real estate agent came in. He and his family had moved over from India, and they'd been through the exact same housing struggles I was facing. He understood the expat version of all this. And I got the house.

A whole house into 8 suitcases

Three weeks later, I flew home and packed a 2,200-square-foot house into 8 suitcases.

Everything else, I sold, donated, or threw away. If I'm doing the math honestly, about 89% of what we owned went in the trash, 5% went to new homes, 5% went into storage, and the last 1% came with us. I sold my car, zipped the last suitcase, and we got on a plane.

2,500 square feet of nothing

We went from a fully stocked house with everything we needed to an empty 2,500-square-foot shell. Two of us in a four-bedroom, three-bathroom house, which is a lot of house for two people, but you take what you can get in this market. And there was a great school nearby.

Here's everything that was in it when we arrived: the dishes I'd bought on my previous trip, a TV that luckily got delivered before we did, some towels, her bed, and a couple of lamps. Her mattress was the only one that had shown up, so for the first week, I slept on it on the floor of her room until I had a bed of my own.

We filled it slowly. A couch. A fridge. A washer and dryer. Eventually, my bed.

It was not planned out well

I want to be honest about this part, because it would be easy to tell this story like I had it all mapped out. I didn't, at least not for anything after we landed. I was completely convinced I could do it all on my own, and I didn't fully understand what I was taking on.

And then I got lucky. I met someone here, and I fell in love. That wasn't the plan either. There wasn't a plan.

Then the job went

The great job, the one that started all of this, was okay with me working from anywhere. That was the piece that made the whole thing possible. Three months after we arrived, I was laid off.

I was unemployed for 8 months after that, living in a house I could afford on the job I'd had when we moved here and couldn't afford on a little bit of severance and unemployment.

Where it landed

I left Arizona with 8 suitcases and my daughter in tow.

Today, I have my husband, our 7-month-old, and a job in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, right across the street from the Opera House on Sydney Harbour. I get to watch it come into view as my train rolls into the station once a week, which is as often as I go into the office in my post-pregnancy days.

I take my breaks on the steps of the Opera House. I watch the ferries head out to Taronga Zoo, and the tourists taking photos of themselves with the bridge and the Opera House behind them, and I never get over how lucky I am, every single day I get to be there.

Standing on top of the Harbour Bridge on that first trip, I never would've guessed I was looking down at the place that would become my workplace just a year later.

We've built a really beautiful life here, and I honestly can't imagine being happier than I am right now.

And my daughter has thrived here. She's more independent. She's made great friends. She's pushed herself out of her comfort zone over and over. Before we moved, she had a hard time spending the night at a friend's house. Since we got here, she's gone to sleepaway camp twice. I think she feels so much more capable than she ever did in our old routine in Phoenix. I'm so fucking proud of that kid.

I'm not telling you this so you'll go sell your house. "Move across the world with no plan" isn't advice. It's just what I did, and it's a big part of who I am.

Have you ever done something big on a whim? Tell me →