We’ve been asked many questions about our trip to France and how we planned it all out.  I thought it would be fun to answer some of the questions people have been asking us about living somewhere else for a month. First, here are some of the questions people have been asking: How did you decide to live and work somewhere else for a month? How did you choose Lyon, France? Can you really work from another country? You’re not really working, are you?

First, how did we decide to live and work from somewhere else for a month?  If you know us, then you know that we love to travel, eat, drink, and experience new things in general.  It doesn’t hurt that I teach and get most of the summer off while Dusty runs a business where he can and does often work remotely.  For the past three summers I’ve been taking classes for my Ph.D. and we haven’t gotten to travel as much as we wanted.  I’ve finished my course work so we thought we’d try living somewhere else for a month.  We started brainstorming and came up with things like, Colorado, some type of beach, and California.  After a while we asked ourselves why we weren’t thinking of traveling outside of the U.S.  Then we started to brainstorm what countries might work.  Really, our only guidelines for choosing a location were that it had a good internet connection so we both could work! 

Somehow we chose France, maybe it was because five years ago Dusty proposed to in France or that I speak a little (I mean very little) French or maybe it was just that we thought there were plenty of sights to be seen in the country.  After talking with several friends who had lived and studied in France as well as researched the country we decided Paris was out of the running because it was too big and just too touristy, and we’ve already been there.  We chose Lyon because it was big enough, we’re totally city people, it looked like there were plenty of places to rent for a month, there were quite a few things to do in and around the city, and it’s the food capital of France (and we like food).

And that’s how we chose Lyon as our home for the month of June.