From the valleys to the desert - welshman moving to Arizona
 

Hi everyone.

I thought I should introduce myself properly - I only discovered this forum a few days ago when I was researching a problem and it looks like it’s going to be extremely helpful to me this year. I’ll be around a lot, I think.

Anyway, I’m 29, I work in PR and have lived in Wales all my life, flitting between Carmarthen in South West Wales to Cardiff then back again. That was until last year. Fair warning: this is a long story.

Back in 2003 all my friends had buggered off to uni, leaving me behind, so I started frequenting a chatroom on one of the early profile sites (this was back in the days before Facebook). I used this chatroom a lot, got to know a lot of people in there, meeting quite a few of them in person between 2003 and 2006, but there was always one who stuck out. She was an American girl who lived in Arizona in a chatroom full of Brits.

We hit it off right away and added each other to our MSN messenger lists (showing my age here), and used to stay up, depending on our respective timezones, to ridiculous hours talking to each other. Every day we’d make special arrangements to be around online so we could chat. We used to toy with the idea of meeting, although it was obviously impossible. Both of us used to daydream about it. “What if we could...”, “what if we’d been born in the same country...”. If only.

Time passed and life went along its merry way. I went off to uni in 2006 and she went off to college and we fell out of touch with each other, mainly due to her losing internet access. I ended up living with someone and so did she, her even having a kid. We’d catch each other briefly on Facebook for five minutes at a time, then spend the rest of the day wishing we could go back to how things were.

Things changed again. I finished uni, my relationship fell apart and I ended up living back at home. I got a grown-up job, started doing an MA degree part time and, back in 2012, was wondering what to do with my life once my course was finished. That’s when she reappeared. A simple ‘hello’ on Facebook messenger completely changed my life.

From August 2012 up until today we haven’t gone a day without speaking to each other. It started on Facebook messenger, then it advanced to a couple of hours a week on Skype. Finally it became 3 hours every weekday over Skype, and anywhere from 5 to almost 12 hours on the weekend.

Last year, in June, the impossible happened. We’d talked about it a lot but, while I was on the phone to her quickly at my sister’s wedding, she offered to pay for my ticket to fly out to Arizona and stay with her. And I did. It’ll probably go down as one of the best weeks of my life. She came out to Wales in October 2013 and everything was perfect. I went to stay with her over Christmas and met almost her entire family, hitting it off with everyone, meeting everybody’s approval.

So on New Year’s Eve, in Bisbee, I popped the question.

We’re now in the process to getting everything together to send off the application in the next couple of weeks. Hopefully by the end of this year I’ll be living in the USA.

I’ve never been that adventurous, so this is the most terrifying, exciting and completely mental thing I’ve ever done. We’ve had so much support from friends and family on both sides - her parents have even agreed to be our co-sponsor and I get along great with her 5-year-old son.

So that’s the story so far. I passed the MA and I’ve had some interview offers over there, now we just need to apply. I’ll be around here a lot, asking stupid questions, worrying over pointless details, chewing the ends of my fingers off and generally going insane, but it really seems like it’s worth it.

Re: From the valleys to the desert - welshman moving to Arizona
 

Hello and welcome to the forum :)

Re: From the valleys to the desert - welshman moving to Arizona
 

Welcome to BE and good luck with the move!

There's a few Taff's knocking around :)

Re: From the valleys to the desert - welshman moving to Arizona
 

What a great and honest post. So glad that someone else is following their heart to another corner of the world like i am! Maybe we are both insane? Good luck with it all.

Re: From the valleys to the desert - welshman moving to Arizona
 

Having been born and brought up in Pontypridd followed by Bridgend in South Wales, might I ask in what field is your MA, and how you intend to use it in Brisbee, Arizona?

It looks like a cute "Western" type of town although

I ended up in San Diego, So.Cal

Re: From the valleys to the desert - welshman moving to Arizona
 

Oh we won’t be living in Bisbee, that’s just where we spent New Year. We’d visited there on my first trip back in June and decided to go back.

My MA is in Cultural and Critical Theory but I work in PR and marketing so those are the kind of jobs I’ve been looking for, mainly in Phoenix although there are other options. I had an interview while I was out there which went really well and altogether I’ve had seven or eight other invitations - a few people have told me to get in touch once I’m moved and settled. Unfortunately it’s not the kind of field where employers offer work visas, but we’d be getting married anyway so we went ahead and decided to the K1 route.

She’s in a small town called Safford at the moment and we’ve saved enough that we’ll be able to wait it out until I’m allowed to work.

Bisbee is also adorable.

How have you found the transition from Wales to the US?

Re: From the valleys to the desert - welshman moving to Arizona
 

Sorry not to have got back to you before.

Hubby and I moved over to the US when I got transferred with my job to Silicon Valley - a much less stressful way that doing it as an individual since the company usually pays for flights, furniture moving, has health insurance already set up etc. We had also left Wales many years ago and lived in Surrey prior to moving over.

We had visited the US many times as brother in law has lived in Palo Alto for 30 years. We knew the West coast pretty well. Always wanted the challenge of living and working in the US. We were 50 at the time so much later in life than you.

Been here 14 years now. Although we still enjoy life here (weather is pretty high up on the list of requirements), the "glamour" of the US has somewhat worn off. The politics are awful, taxes (especially if one owns a property) are very high, utility costs in California are rising all the time and until the Affordable Care Act (read affordable only if you don't earn a decent salary) one was always in fear of losing ones health insurance if you lost your job.

Having said that country has some of the most spectacular scenery and if one like travelling, hiking, biking etc then there are great places to get into nature.

All in all we have enjoyed our stay here, but we may return to the UK later on.