By Tamara Hardingham-Gill | CNN
They moved to France from San Francisco in October 2023, but just over 12 months later, Joanna McIsaac-Kierklo and her husband Ed Kierklo say they are on the brink of returning to the US.
While Joanna, 74, and Ed, 75, intended to spend the rest of their lives in the European country, the retired couple have struggled to make friends and are becoming increasingly frustrated with French bureaucracy.
“We gave it a year here,” says Joanna. “And we just said, ‘Too much grief and no joy.’ There’s no fun. We’re struggling every day.”
‘Frustrated and exhausted’
Joanna says she isn’t a fan of the food in France and finds it hard to find good produce.(Courtesy Joanna McIsaac-Kierklo via CNN Newsource)
“I honestly don’t think we could have put in any more effort to acclimatize to the French way of life,” adds Joanna, who describes their experience as “a nightmare.”
While they’re still working out the finer details of their imminent return, Joanna and Ed say that they’re “frustrated and exhausted,” by life in France and feel ready to “give up and leave.”
Uprooting their lives in the Californian city and moving to France was certainly not a decision taken lightly, they say.
Joanna and Ed, who’ve been married for 20 years, had already traveled the world extensively, both together and separately, beforehand.
“I didn’t get married till I was in my 50s,” says Joanna, who is originally from San Francisco. “So when I met my husband, we traveled.
“We have no children. No siblings. No parents. There’s nothing to encumber us doing exactly what we please.”
Joanna explains that she and Ed bought and sold three different homes during their first 15 years of marriage, “giving us a comfortable amount of cash to afford us the option to travel and even relocate to anywhere we wanted.”
In 2010, the couple bought a summer home in Northern California and spent eight years or so “going back and forth to San Francisco.”
“I think every married couple needs two places to live, because you’ve got to get away from each other,” adds Joanna, who previously worked as a healthcare executive.
But she says she was becoming increasingly frustrated with the political climate in the US and felt the urge to move somewhere else permanently.
“I’m a pretty political person, and I feel like the United States should be better,” she says. “And it never gets better.”
In 2011, the couple moved to London and spent much of their spare time traveling to different countries around Europe.
“I loved every place I went,” says Joanna. “I really enjoyed seeing a lot of Europe.”
After deciding that they couldn’t afford to live in the UK capital anymore, Joanna and Ed, a former IT executive, returned to San Francisco and tried to work out where to go next.
They’d previously spent two months living in the city of Nîmes in Southern France and “loved every minute,” so the destination seemed like it could be the ideal choice for them.
“We were looking for civility, consideration and little or no …read more
Source:: The Mercury News – Entertainment
