The Irish Times, August 2023
Well, I want to tell you a bit of history.
Growing up in the west of Ireland, at a time when there was only one television in the house, I tended to read a lot. I think that sparked my interest in other parts of the world. I remember I couldn't wait to finish school and I had already got my apprenticeship as a hairdresser. My goal was to graduate as soon as possible so I could go to Australia, where everyone was coming back with amazing adventure stories. I had been dreaming about it for a long time. Back then, apprenticeships used to take four years, but you could get it sooner if you worked hard, and my goal was two years. So, two months before my 20th birthday, I got my degree. I had to earn money to make my dream come true.
I met my now husband, whom I thanked for thinking that going to Australia was a great idea. While living in Australia we both lost some older members of our family and realised that maybe it was a bit too far for us. So, after backpacking for 6 months, we decided to spend 6 months in South America, which included 1 month in a school in Chile to try and learn some Spanish.
I remember when our trip was about to end I thought, "Wow, my one goal in life has been fulfilled". So we returned to Ireland to live out the rest of our days as we thought we should. Home, children. But I think the re-entry was a struggle for both of us. We had seen the world and now we were doing the same thing every day. Things weren't as plentiful in the west of Ireland, so Wesley took his time going back to school and I started to dream a little bit again. My mother lives in San Francisco, so when Wesley finished school we decided we would see if we could make a go of it there.
This time it was much more difficult, because we were bringing our two children and it is an incredibly expensive place to live. But two years later I started working on my own and things started to improve.
Things were going really well and then Covid came along. I think everyone knows how he made everyone rethink their lives. Suddenly Ireland was a bit far away again. Also, we had never felt at home before. So we started dreaming again. We didn't feel the need to live in Ireland, but we wanted something closer. I always had the idea of my children having two languages and as my Irish is extremely poor but my Spanish was still somewhere in there maybe we could try Spain.
From San Francisco, how can you even begin to know what part of Spain to go to live in so we decided we were going to take the kids backpacking and even walk a bit of the Camino de Santiago. I firmly believed that when I opened up, the answers would come to me. I also committed that the way I was going to relearn my Spanish was to homeschool the kids while we travelled because I did it for a full year during covid so I could do it for another three months well. We took the kids out of school a little early in May and set a goal to have them picked somewhere in August to go to school in Spain.
We started in Barcelona, got as far as Pamplona and started to walk the Camino. We thought we might make it as far as Burgos, but we got as far as Logroño. So far it has been one of the most incredible experiences of my life and I am more than grateful to have done it with my children.
We then set about exploring some areas we had considered: Valladolid, Salamanca, Alicante, Torremolinos, Toledo, Granada, Cadiz, but nothing seemed right until we got to Nerja. It must have happened to Wesley while we were here because we came to see his friends and they were looking at houses. I didn't feel it until we left and then I felt it in my stomach as if why would I leave this place. And not only that, but the last two places we were going to see I just wanted time to run out until we could go back to Nerja. We reduced our last place from a week to four days. I arranged to see a house as soon as we arrived in town and that is where we live.
In the meantime we also knew that work in Spain was hard and after being self-employed for five years I didn't really want to go back to work for someone else so we were looking for what could be a business opportunity. One of my first jobs in San Francisco was next door to an amazing specialty coffee roaster. They had a warehouse where every part of the process was done. So you could have a delicious cup of coffee while watching them do the whole process. At the beginning we didn't have money for this coffee, but I always liked it. Growing up in Mayo with an American mother, our house was always considered the place to get good coffee in the days when you could hardly get ground coffee. My mother always made French press coffee on special occasions and at dinner parties. When I was studying hairdressing, I thought that one day I would have a hairdressing salon with a Starbucks inside. In Australia I learned what an amazing cup of coffee should taste like. In Paris I learned how to drink it black. I became the person who made good coffee in my village, so when we started making some money in America Wes would buy me specialty coffee. Eventually I couldn't drink anything else. So one day in Salamanca, after drinking another cup of horrible coffee, I knew, even before I knew where we wanted to live, that I wanted to become a coffee roaster.
Now, almost a year later, Wes and I go every weekend to markets all over the Costa del Sol and Granada and sell freshly roasted coffee beans to Spaniards, tourists and expats. Our children now speak incredible Spanish and we hope we can continue to keep our dream alive. We love it here. The children have incredible freedom and it feels a bit like Westport, but in the sun.
