How I Left America After a Brand New Life in Ireland

Editor’s Note: This story appeared on Live and Invest Overseas.

My personal live-and-plant-abroad journey began with a week-long trip to Ireland.

I was packaging and marketing a program to readers of a travel magazine I was publishing. I was going to host this trip and invited my parents and 8-year-old daughter to come. It seemed like a good opportunity to combine business and fun.

At that time, I had a clear personal agenda: I wanted to live in Europe.

Fortunately for me, this interest coincided with a career opportunity.

Personal agenda meets professional opportunity

The publishing company where I was a partner wanted to establish a presence in the EU.

This was the era of the Celtic Tiger, and Ireland was working hard to attract foreign investment. The Industrial Development Agency (IDA) was offering a 12% corporate tax rate, grants per Irish employee, and other incentives to foreign companies that would agree to set up offices in certain Irish cities.

This program made us pay attention, and a plan emerged. Our EU firm will be based in Ireland, and I will be moving there to do it.

Stripped down, here’s the view:

I would be leaving my hometown (the city where I was born and lived my entire life so far), my family, my friends, Kaitlin’s school, and the stable role of my business partner with many of the positives that I have worked so hard to achieve.

Step 2, I would go with my little daughter to build a new life in a new place where I don’t know anyone and have no support infrastructure.

Why not.

My first challenge was to decide where this new EU operation could be based. IDA Ireland had given us three options – Sligo, Galway, or Waterford – all areas with local economies that could benefit from foreign investment.

Hence the need for the tour-cum-scouting trip I have planned. I had been to Ireland before but only on holiday and not to any of those cities.

Options to explore on the discovery journey

On the first morning of that Discovery Tour, I sat on a table in the meeting rooms of the Jury’s Hotel in Dublin with 30 other guests, including my parents and my daughter, who I would be traveling with for the next seven days. We reunited on the itinerary: Dublin to Wexford to Waterford, then a night or two each in Cork, Sligo, Belfast, and, finally, back to Dublin.

As the plans for the week were confirmed, I told the gentleman sitting to my right that I had trouble accessing my email from the hotel’s business center earlier that morning.

“I don’t want to leave without checking into the Baltimore office,” I explained, “but I can’t find a way to access my account.”

“You should ask that guy at the end of the table to help you,” my new friend offered. “His name is Lief Simon. I think he knows about computers.”

Meeting with a partner scout

Lief Simon, I learned over the next few days, a long-time reader of the travel magazine I published, was in Ireland with a plan similar to mine.

Lief, too, was on the trip not as a tourist but as an explorer. Divorced from his wife of five years just two months earlier, Lief wanted to make another big change in his life. She wanted to move from Chicago, Illinois, where she lived and worked while married, to somewhere in Ireland.

On the last night of the tour, back in Dublin, Lief asked if I would like to go with the others to a nightclub across town. Our crowd danced until closing time, went back to the hotel, gave each other a quick hug in the elevators, and wished each other well.

I returned to Baltimore to continue planning my Irish program. Now that I had seen most of the country, I had some ideas.

Sligo, on the country’s rugged and windswept north-west coast, has a Wuthering Heights kind of charm but it didn’t seem like a place to try to build a business or raise a daughter. I decided to focus my research on Galway and Waterford.

Amazing drive back to Baltimore

Then one afternoon the phone rang in my office.

“One of the guys from your trip to Ireland last month called and asked for your number.”

It was Patti, one of the girls who had helped plan the trip with me. “Which boy?” I asked.

“His name is Lief Simon. He called this morning saying he wanted to talk to you. I told him I would have to check first.”

“Are you okay Simon?”

“The one we went dancing with on the last night in Dublin,” explained Patti.

“Ah … OK … Yes, go ahead and give him my number.”

Two hours later, when I returned from the meeting, I had a voicemail:

“Hello. This is Lief Simon. We met in Ireland a few weeks ago. I’d like to take you to dinner. Call me.”

Lief came to Baltimore the following weekend and we had dinner. Two weeks later, I went to Chicago and we had dinner. Two weeks later, Lief was back in Baltimore. He and I had to make a trip back to Ireland, Lief to continue searching for his place, I decided in which city to set up the new office, Waterford or Galway.

“Let’s go back together,” suggested Lief.

And we do.

A life-changing proposal and final decision

For our last night in Dublin on this trip we stayed at a small bed and breakfast called Charleston House just outside the city. On the morning of our flight back to the States, Lief made another proposal.

“Maybe we should move to Ireland together,” he said shyly. “What do I mean if we’re married?”

And that was the beginning of our plan to go overseas.

How did we decide in the end between Galway and Waterford?

Lief had identified a piece of property, Pouldrew House, that he was interested in purchasing for his residential development idea, and it was located outside of Waterford City. Not only did Lief buy Pouldrew House, but Waterford became our new home.

Arriving alone in a foreign city

The first night I arrived in Waterford City as a resident I was alone. I took the train down from Dublin, alone. Kaitlin and Lief were still in the States … packing, planning, preparing.

When I arrived at Waterford train station in Heuston with eight large suitcases, two backpacks, a wallet, and a laptop, I caught the eye of an Irish man and his wife.

A couple sat across from me on the three and a half hour train ride from Dublin and took pity, I think, on this young woman arriving late and alone in a new city with so much baggage. They offered to take me to the Granville Hotel, where I had planned to stay.

They loaded me and my luggage into their van, then we left the train station and crossed the bridge into Waterford City.

It is this icon of the city, from the first arrival at night, that I carry with me all these years later.

Once a bustling port city with ships lined up at the docks importing and exporting to France, Spain, and beyond, Waterford when we appeared on the scene was forgotten and struggling.

But, at night, crossing the River Suir, the lights of the Georgian waterfront townhouses twinkling on the harbour, Reginald’s Tower in the distance, watching over the city as it has done since the early 13th century, you can imagine the place as it must have been.

Arriving at night years ago, looking at the city for the first time from the bridge into the city, Waterford seemed magical and full of promise.