There was no single morning when we decided. It built slowly, the way water finds a crack before it finds a way through. Another grey winter in Estonia. Another year of saying “when things settle down.” At some point we noticed we’d been waiting for a version of “ready” that was never going to arrive on its own.
So this is us saying it out loud: we’re building a new life in Senegal. Not a two-week trip we’ll post about and forget. A real move — the kind with boxes, and goodbyes, and a lot of unknowns we’re figuring out as we go.
We’re not travel influencers. We’re not experts on relocation. We’re just a family who got tired of scrolling past the life we actually wanted and decided to go build it instead. This blog is where we’re keeping the real record — not the highlight reel, the actual one. The parts that are hard, the parts that are funny, and the parts that make the whole thing worth it.
The Practical Bit
Skip this part if you’re just here for the feeling — it’ll still be here later. For anyone actually mapping out a similar move, here’s what we’re working through right now: flight routes and timing, visa and residency paperwork, what to ship versus sell versus leave behind, and finding the first month’s housing before we’ve set foot in the neighbourhood. We’re documenting the real numbers and real steps as we go through them, in Carnets Pratiques, rather than guessing at figures before we have them. If you’re planning your own version of this move, that’s the series to follow.
But that’s not really what this is about. What this is about is a version of us that gets to exist somewhere warmer, slower, closer to the ground. We don’t know yet what it’s going to feel like to actually live there instead of dream about it. That’s the whole reason we’re writing this down — so we don’t forget the before, and so you can see the after as it actually happens, not as a highlight reel.