Never Suffer From the Frostbite Effect Again

Sunday, Sept. 7, 2008

Read more about moving abroad in International Living Postcards—your daily escape

Dear International Living Reader,

I was driving back to Omaha on a deserted state highway in the middle of the night in the dead of winter. I’d been visiting a friend in the Nebraska countryside.

I was halfway home when the snowstorm caught me.

Gusting wind rocked the car and blew blinding snow across the road, hiding patches of black ice underneath. I clenched the steering wheel and crept down the dead center of the highway at 15 miles per hour trying not to slide or get blown into the ditches on either side.

I turned the radio off after I heard that the wind-chill index was 60°F below zero. Between wind gusts, I listened carefully for the sound of the engine, hoping the gas line wouldn’t freeze before I got back to town.

“If the car stalls out here,” I thought, “I’ll die.”

Just another winter night in Nebraska.

Any native of the northern U.S. and Canada has been through the same thing. It’s just a fact of life there...get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and winter can do you in.

Being a Nebraska native, I never seriously considered doing anything about it...until my wife, Suzan, said something to me after one especially brutal cold spell.

“You know,” she said, “there are places in the world where the weather won’t kill you.”

She’d been reading International Living.

“Oh really,” I said. “Like where?”

Since then we’ve lived in Panama, Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Mexico. And you know what? Suzan was right. We haven’t seen weather in any one of those places that would kill you if your car stalled or you got locked out of your house without a parka.

There are a lot of good reasons to move abroad, but weather was the one that did it for me. There are a lot of expats out here who moved for the same reason.

I call it the Frostbite Effect. Other people call it moving where the weather suits your clothes. Either way, it’s one of the parts I like best about living in the tropics...sending pictures of myself and Suzan sunning ourselves on the beach to the folks back home around Christmas time.

And I’d have never even considered it if it hadn’t been for Suzan and International Living.

You can’t have Suzan, but you can always get International Living. It will open up a whole new world of warm, comfy places where you can relax and complain happily about how bad the weather was back home.

Try it. You’ll like it.

Best regards,

Dan Prescher
Publisher, International Living

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