After we finished all 50 states, people kept asking: what's next? The honest answer, for longer than we'd like to admit, was that we had no idea.

We knew we wanted Scotland. We'd fallen in love with it over multiple visits, always in winter (which people think is crazy, but winter Scotland is when the country feels most like itself). We knew we wanted to buy a place and put down some roots. We just didn't have the legal right to do any of that yet.

The visa

James applied for a UK Exceptional Talent visa. The process was long, opaque, and full of the kind of bureaucratic uncertainty that makes you want to scream into a pillow. You submit your application with evidence of your career, endorsements, publications, whatever makes your case. And then you wait. For months. With no real sense of whether it's going well or going badly.

We couldn't commit to anything while we waited. Couldn't buy a house. Couldn't sign a lease. Couldn't tell the kids where they'd be in six months because we genuinely didn't know.

Airbnb surfing

So we Airbnb-surfed. Through Scotland. Through Spain. Through Hawaii (James had military duty there, so we tagged along and soaked up the sunshine our vitamin D levels desperately needed after a long Scottish winter and spring).

Airbnb surfing sounds romantic until you've packed and unpacked your family's belongings for the seventh time in three months. The kids were troopers, mostly. Calvin adapted to each new place with the resilience of someone who's been moving since he was five. Millie just wanted to know where her stuffed animals were going to sleep.

The hardest part wasn't the moving. It was the not knowing. Kids pick up on uncertainty even when you try to shield them from it. Calvin started asking "are we going to live here?" at every new Airbnb. Not in a worried way, exactly. More like he was trying to map the shape of his future and kept coming up with blanks.

Putting Colletta in storage

In November 2024, we put the Airstream into storage in Southern California. That was hard. Colletta had been our home for four years. Closing her up, covering her, and walking away felt like leaving a family member at a hospital.

James handled the logistics (he always does). I handled the emotions (I always do). Calvin patted her side and said, "See you later, Colletta." Millie didn't fully understand, but she waved at the storage unit as we drove away, which broke me completely.

September 2025

The visa came through in September. I got the email at 6am, sitting in another Airbnb, in another temporary place, and I just stared at the screen for a full minute before waking James.

"We got it," I said.

He sat straight up in bed. "We got it?"

"We got it."

We sat there in the dark, grinning like idiots. All those months of uncertainty, of not knowing, of answering Calvin's "are we going to live here?" with gentle deflections. It was over. We had a path.

What this year taught me

I thought I was good at uncertainty. We'd spent years living without a fixed address, making it up as we went. But there's a difference between chosen uncertainty and forced uncertainty. Choosing to travel with no fixed plan feels like freedom. Waiting for a government to decide your future feels like limbo.

The year taught me that I'm not as unflappable as I thought. That my kids are more resilient than I give them credit for. That James is calm under pressure in a way that I will never fully understand and will always be grateful for. And that sometimes the best thing you can do when everything is up in the air is just keep moving, keep showing up, and trust that the ground will eventually appear under your feet.

It did. And now we're standing on it, on a small island off the west coast of Scotland, with a crumbling cottage that's about to become our home.