Whilst published on April 3rd, 2026 — Entry 1 of The Diary really begins in February of 2022 — the day Russia invaded Ukraine and our lives would change permanently.
The first few entries of this diary are designed to get you caught up to speed with how we got here. As of April 3rd, 2026, we have received news from the Portuguese Consulate that they expect our final visa decision on April 24th.
February 24th, 2022
My wife shook me awake. There was real urgency in her voice.
I heard what I thought was a fire truck. Or a police car.
Nope. Air raid sirens.
Russia was here.
She was seven weeks pregnant.
Oh boy.
We’d just come back from Western Ukraine. I’d wanted to leave the country entirely — I had a feeling something was coming. But she was pregnant, she wanted to see our doctor, she wanted to get our dog. So the story goes.
And now the sirens were going.
And stuff was beginning to fall from the sky. On fire.
I hadn’t unpacked from the trip. That ended up being the smartest accident of my life. I grabbed the bag, shoved in water jugs and dry food, some nice whiskey to barter with, a 12″ Japanese kitchen knife as a weapon if it came to it — and we were ready to move.
We waited a day. Tried to ride it out at her parents apartment in the suburbs.
Then something hit an apartment building less than a kilometer away. The windows lit up orange. The ground shook. People dead. The works.
That was it.
4:30 in the morning. Me, my pregnant wife, our dog, and her father. I took the wheel and we drove out of Kyiv.
I ran about fifty red lights. Passed tanks pointing their guns at us. Two nights of sleeping in the car in freezing temperatures.
We crossed the border into Poland.
My family was safe. That was all that mattered.
That night, in a random hotel in Poland, I had the best meal of my life…from Pizza Hut. And a few beers. Maybe more than a few.
I wish that was the end of the story. It should’ve been. But it really was just beginning.
We Went To Prague
We’d lived there before — years earlier, when we first left Ukraine together. So it wasn’t completely foreign. But it was limbo. We were in a holding pattern, trying to figure out what came next.
My wife already had a US visa. The plan was to get to America. But bringing our dog required a mountain of paperwork — weeks of permits, vet certificates, things that don’t move fast when half of Eastern Europe is in chaos. My uncle, who was reasonably high up in political circles in Southern California — managed to call in favors to a congressman to help push things through.
After about a month, we made it to California.
Three weeks later, my mom was diagnosed with stage four cancer.
I’ll spare you the details of that chapter. Not because it’s not important, but because it deserves more than a few paragraphs inside someone else’s story.
What I’ll say is this:
She was cancer-free by November. She told us to go. “Go live your life,” she said. My dad said the same thing. And we believed it was going to be OK.
We’d been planning to move to Italy. I have Italian heritage — citizenship by descent was the path. I’d actually started the application years earlier, back in Ukraine, before the war. Had documents gathered, paperwork submitted.
But some of those documents had been sitting in a folder for two years already, and they had a three-year shelf life. Others needed to be requested by my mom. And with her being as sick as she was — even though she was fighting, even though she kept saying she was going to beat it — I didn’t realistically know if we could pull it off.
The last thing I wanted was to move my family to a country we’d never really lived in and have the entire plan fall apart because a birth certificate expired or a document we needed was suddenly impossible to get.
So when a good friend said, “Come to Wroclaw. It’s great here. You’ll love it,” we went.
That was April.
Seven weeks later, we got the call. I needed to come home.
Mom Passed Away June 20th, 2023
I was sleep-deprived with a six-month-old, on a different continent, in a country I’d lived in for less than two months.
I don’t really know what I was thinking during that time. I’m not sure I was thinking. You just move. You just keep going because you have a baby who needs you and a wife who needs you and a business that needs you and stopping isn’t an option.
So we stayed in Poland. And we tried to make it home.
It wasn’t home.
It wasn’t bad. Wroclaw is a fine city. Beautiful, actually. Affordable. Good restaurants. Nice parks. A million times better than the alternative, which was a war zone.
But it wasn’t ours.
We were both outsiders. My wife is Ukrainian in a country that had suddenly absorbed millions of Ukrainians, with all the tension that comes with that.
It’s hard when neither of you is home.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about being a foreign couple. At least when one of you is local, you have roots. You have family. You have someone who knows how things work, who speaks the language without thinking, who has a doctor and a dentist and a mechanic.
We had none of that.
Ukraine Had Been Home
We were going to stay there forever. Even California, for all its problems, had been easier — when it’s just so much of you around, the friction disappears. Everything is in your language, your culture, your systems.
Poland was fine. And “fine” is the most dangerous word in the English language.
Three years in, we still haven’t gotten our Polish residency visas. Three years of waiting.
(Yes, that’s of today, April 3rd, 2026…)
Here’s the thing that broke me:
The weather.
Eastern Europe from November to February is miserable.
I don’t mean cold. I can handle cold. I mean the kind of grey where the sun doesn’t show up for six weeks. Where it’s dark at 3:30pm. Where you wake up in the dark and come home in the dark and the hours in between aren’t much better.
I’m an outdoors person. I cycle. I golf. I run. I take my daughter to the playground. I go for walks.
From November to February, all of that is off the table. Some days you physically cannot go outside and do anything. The weather isn’t just inconvenient — it cancels your life for four months.
After my mom died, I had time to process things. And somewhere in that processing, a thought started forming that I couldn’t shake.
Am I going to spend 33% of my remaining years…unable to do the things I love?
Not 33% of a year.
33% of the rest of my life.
Which, as I’d just learned…was fleetingly short.
Because those four months come every year. They don’t skip. They don’t get shorter. And even the summers here — even July — you get days that go from sunny to grey and rainy by lunch. The weather is constantly changing. You can never count on it.
So when I added it up — four months of actual misery, plus another two or three months of unreliable weather — I was looking at spending close to half my life in conditions that made me unhappy.
Something in me broke.
Not dramatically. Not a meltdown. Just a quiet, clear thought:
No. I’m not doing this.
My wife didn’t want to leave. Not at first.
I get it. Every time we’d moved — Prague, back to Kyiv, out of Kyiv during the war, California, Poland — it had been my call. Or the world’s call. Never really hers. She’d spent years building something in Wrocław. Learning the language. Making friends. Finding community.
And here I was again, saying we should go.
But I wasn’t willing to sacrifice 33% of my life. I wasn’t willing to look back at 80 and realize I’d spent twenty-five years of it miserable because I was too comfortable to make a change.
So in the summer of 2024, we started talking about it. Not seriously at first. Just kicking the idea around. What if we went somewhere warm? Somewhere with actual sunshine? Somewhere we could build a life that didn’t shut down for four months a year?
Portugal came up.
I don’t even remember who said it first.
But once it was on the table, it wouldn’t go away.
Someday, when we’re settled, I’m going to bring my mom to Portugal. Her ashes are going to rest somewhere warm. Somewhere with sun and green and ocean air.
She’s going to love it.
Next: Lisbon the Favelas →