You might not have noticed, but we moved about two months ago.

Cornwall is a very special place to us. We’ve spent 8 of our 9 years of marriage living there. Our son was born there and has lived there for over 5 years. It wasn’t an easy decision, but we decided that the time had come to move.

The decision wasn’t an easy one to make for lots of reasons, at the very least we had felt that we had moved to Cornwall with a purpose and that it would probably be our home for a long time to come, but we always knew that we would need to move at some point to be nearer to our parents in their dotage. It turned out, though, that family was something we were missing more and more.

People who visit Cornwall for a week or two a year don’t always realise just how remote it can be. For a lot of people, it’s this sense of removal from the busy-ness of life that brings them back year after year, after all.

Living there we accepted this and even embraced it the majority of the time, but it was difficult travelling to/from family, particularly during difficult times. We lived so far west that our journey out of Cornwall itself would take at least an hour and could be much worse in holiday traffic.

I didn’t get to see my sisters or their families very often, they were at least five and half hours from us. Around Christmas Lucy’s sister had a baby and her dad was about to retire, we didn’t want to miss out anymore.

The thing that allowed us to move to Cornwall was that we were relatively untethered: no mortgage, no children etc. It turned out that with me working for myself from home and our child home-educated that we were still pretty untethered. That came in very handy because we went from “just looking” at houses to moving in within about 6 weeks!

We’re now living close to Lucy’s family and about half of the distance to mine. We’re also within reach of shops and facilities we had almost forgotten existed!

Of course, there are times when we miss Cornwall, and it will always be special to us. I’m still slowly learning Cornish. That being said, however, we’re also making the most of where we are and just getting stuck into life here.

Photo credit: naiaraback1 via VisualHunt / CC BY