“Last call for Austrian Airlines flight OS90 to Vienna.”

My wife, my daughter, and I looked at each other.

I grew up in a family of rushers. You had to be first in every line, especially on planes. So waiting there to be the last people to board the plane was unusual. Then again, nothing about that time in our life was normal.

It was July 2020. The pandemic was in full swing. And we were moving from Pennsylvania to Romania. Hence no rush to get on a plane full of people.

I don’t recommend relocating across the world during a global lockdown. The decision kind of found us because the previous November I’d left a 20-year tech career to start coaching and working with leaders. Had I known the planet was about to shut its doors, I might have timed things differently.

We had a trip planned to see my mother-in-law in May of 2020. She lived in Romania. We figured if we’re going to be locked inside for a year, why not be locked inside while living in a beautiful country. And my mother-in-law really didn’t have anyone else around if she got sick.

Moving to Romania would also be a huge benefit to my daughter. She’d have the chance to get to know my wife’s side of the family, learn a new language, and see a different way of living. In all honesty, my wife and I needed a change in scenery too. Our marriage was struggling, especially after my decision to leave my company. It put a financial and emotional strain on her that I underestimated.

At the same time, the worries and concerns were real too. What would a year away do to my daughter’s schooling? What about money? Health coverage, if one of us got sick? What about work, even in a world suddenly running on Zoom?

So we made a deal with ourselves. If a 1,000 things fell into place, every single one, we’d take it as a sign and go. We figured the odds were slim, but “why not?” Ironically, things started to fall into place very quickly. Literally, the next day, my wife posted our home to rent in one of those local moms’ groups. Within 24 hours a lady replied saying she’d take it. Six years later, that same woman continues to rent.

One by one, 999 things lined up with almost eerie ease. The only thing standing in our way were the airlines, which were canceling more and more flights. Several times our flight got canceled and rescheduled. We finally got to a point of no return. The airlines rescheduled us for the second week in July. If we didn’t make it out then, we weren’t going to go.

We also had already signed the lease and didn’t want to leave our renter hanging, so for the first week of July we were homeless. In the middle of a pandemic, nobody wanted a family of three on their couch. Finally an uncle mentioned a little studio he normally rented as an Airbnb on the Jersey shore. It was available because no one was traveling. So there we were living on a beach: no house, no certainty, not even sure if we’d make it out of the country.

That whole chapter was best symbolized by one morning there at the beach. While building sandcastles with my daughter, my wife stood at the water’s edge in the early morning light. My daughter ran up beside her and I just watched. Both of them loved the sea. Me, I’m as pale as you can get, so I’d rather pass on the bucket of sunscreen and shade required not to burn. Anyway, it was one of those moments that catch you by surprise. I didn’t expect it, but amidst all the chaos and struggles, I felt this timeless calm come over me. A subtle but clear sense all was somehow going to work out.

A few days later our Austrian Airlines flight was one of the few that ran. The day after, Vienna International Airport and many others shut down completely. It felt like the world had opened a door just long enough for us to step through.

Life in Romania

My connection to Romania began in 2003. I was stationed there as a Peace Corps Volunteer and I immediately fell in love with the country.

What I love most about Romania are the people. They have a rawness on the surface, but underneath there’s a warmth and loyalty that’s rare. The food is honest and hearty. The nature is wild and untouched. And the way the villages tuck up against the mountains can make you feel like you’ve slipped back in time.

So much had changed in the years since we had last been there. The place felt familiar and foreign all at once. It was strange.

We found an apartment right next door to my mother-in-law. That was wonderful and occasionally maddening in precisely the ways you’d expect.

What stood out first was actually the absence of something. The low, constant hum of anxiety most people carry in the States, myself included. People in Romania were careful and took precautions for the pandemic, but the background anxiety had dropped a few notches.

Until moving here, I didn’t realize how much worry and pressure weighed on me each day. People assume the cost of living here is much cheaper. In actuality, the prices of food, electronics, and clothes are similar, if not more, than in the States. What’s drastically cheaper is the cost of opening your eyes in the morning. Health insurance. Car insurance. Those fixed costs that weigh down your monthly budget are a fraction of what we were used to. And that felt like a breath of fresh air. It still does to this day.

My daughter dove into her new life here. Within months she was fluent in Romanian, after just being able to express a few words. Very quickly she noticed how people socialize differently too. “We know so many more people here,” she said one day. Truth is, we didn’t know more people. We just saw them more often than the people we knew in the States.

In Romania, people don’t live to work. There’s a rhythm to daily life, more of a balance. Saturdays actually feel like Saturdays. Relationships are very important here. You needed them to survive during the Communist regime. You need them to navigate the bureaucracy today. But mostly relationships matter because that’s the culture. My wife is still friends even with her classmates from grade school.

Then there’s the landscape. We live in Sibiu, a town going back 800 years. Walking through the center still makes me feel like a tourist sometimes. The squares are wide and cobbled. The streets are washed in pastel colors, ringed by merchant houses with steep roofs. Set into those roofs are narrow, hooded windows that look like half-closed eyes. The locals call them the eyes of the city. Cross the main square at dusk and you genuinely feel watched over, in the best way, by a place that has been watching people cross it for centuries.

What intrigues me the most is who fills that square. On a summer evening you’ll hear four or five languages bouncing off the stone. I spent my whole life never quite feeling part of the place I lived. Here, standing on streets older than my entire country, I feel a part of something. A small, recent thread in a weave centuries in the making.

That’s not to disparage the States. It’s just something I didn’t know I’d been missing.

The everyday is its own kind of rich. We often buy food the day we cook it, sometimes so fresh you want to eat it out of your hands on the way home.

Just outside of the city, horse and carts still clop past now and then, like they wandered out of another century. Someone down the street makes his own plum brandy. And if it’s sunny on the weekend, you’ll inevitably smell people cooking up a gratar (Romanian for BBQ).

For us as a family, we have more flexibility and connection. Living here gave us our mornings back. We have breakfast together, more slowly and intentionally. I never realized how important that is. Even if you put in the same hours of work and running around, sequence matters for family. It’s like whatever you do first in the day somehow weighs on your psyche.

My wife and I both have work here and in the States, so our evenings can go long. We try to take a walk together before the calls start. Or we’ll spend time together running errands. We also run a small wellness center in town, which we opened last year. That can make our days demanding, especially when we have bigger events.

Overall, our way of life is very different in a way that feels much more aligning. We’re all grateful for that. Most of this wasn’t on our list back in 2020. We just said yes. And so much of it found us along the way.

What This Journey Has Taught Me

Our plan initially was to be in Romania for a year, to ride out the pandemic. Next month, though, marks six years since we boarded that OS90 flight.

Looking back, I smile at how differently I see the whole thing now, and at how much we’ve grown.

The biggest change is around connection. We don’t just say we value it; it’s become our litmus test. It’s so easy to fall into the rut of running and going and feeling like you can’t stop. Plenty of people here are chasing that life too, and hey, to each their own. But relationships are a living thing. They don’t flourish unless you water them with attention, presence, and time together. For sure, the culture and lower cost of living help. But we choose to prioritize flexibility and quality time together, especially during my daughter’s formative years. And that has led me to become more of the father and husband I actually want to be.

I’ve said no to so many things in my life because I was unclear or uncertain of the how. But there’s so much more adventure, fulfillment, and opportunity waiting on the other side of saying yes.

Romania never fit into any of our five-year plans. Neither did a pandemic, for that matter. But saying yes to something that felt right, no matter how unlikely or foolish on paper, is what opened the door to all of this.

I’ve come to realize the things we fear are almost always scarier in our heads than they turn out to be. Moving to a new country isn’t really that different from moving to a new town. There’s just a longer list of things to figure out. And you do figure them out. We all do.

This shift in mindset is why we decided to open up a wellness center without much of a plan. We walked by a building we loved and felt inspired by it. The opportunity kind of found us. It’s also why we decided two years into our Romania adventure to donate all our possessions in the States that we had put in storage. There was no point paying for it to just collect dust. Bit by bit, this became our life.

Having said all that, don’t get me wrong. My brain can still doubt with the best of them. It’ll easily hand me a hundred reasons why something won’t work. But through this experience, I’ve learned to really weigh the other side too, everything we stand to gain by saying yes. With Romania, there was so much to gain just by giving it a shot.

So really as an entrepreneur, as a parent, and as a world traveler, there’s something freeing about letting go of the plan everybody insists you’re supposed to live by. The metrics that others claim equal success or security or doing things right. There’s something very empowering about choosing deliberately. And simply seeing what happens.

I don’t want to turn this into a 10 tips kind of article. So I’ll leave you with this. Where in your life are you wanting to say yes to something, but you’re stuck on how it could ever work? What if you didn’t need all thousand things to line up at once — just the next one? What could be waiting on the other side of that yes.

About the Author

Hey there! I’m Dave, the heart and inspiration behind Day-to-Day 2.0. I’m an entrepreneur and father living abroad in Transylvania who spent a decade obsessed with answering one question: why does the path to getting ahead keep putting us at odds with ourselves? By day, I’m co-founder of Origin Wellness Center, exec coach, and a TEDx speaker. Here, I write about becoming more alive and aligned today — not someday. I open up about the mess of being a father, husband, and entrepreneur all at once. And I sit down with entrepreneurs over coffee and cozonac to hear the stories and lessons we don’t normally get to hear.

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