City Living
View from our Airbnb in Madrid, Spain (April 2026)
In 1990, at 20, when we were dating, we went to San Francisco for the day and talked about how we both wanted to live in a city after college graduation. We talked about loving San Francisco but also wanting to explore other places like New York City. Zeke was then in Chico, California, and I was living in the East Bay.
After we were married in 1996, and after spending a horrible Christmas in Manhattan (Zeke got food poisoning on Christmas Eve), we once again talked about where we wanted to live once I finished my MBA program and what we wanted to do.
We considered the Peace Corps, but I was terrified of falling behind in my career. We contemplated New York City again, but after hearing about my cousin's experience carrying groceries home on the subway, we decided it would be too inconvenient.
So once I graduated, we got out of our lease in Hayward, moved in with Zeke’s parents (with our cat) in Castro Valley, and started looking for jobs and a place to live in San Francisco. Zeke got a job at Oracle in Redwood Shores and I got a job at Norcal Waste Systems technically in San Francisco but closer to South San Francisco.
We found a tiny apartment on the corner of Church and 20th, overlooking Dolores Park and downtown San Francisco. It was in hideous shape and took some serious cleaning and painting to make our 750-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bath apartment livable. By Thanksgiving 1997, we were living in the City.
We were living the dream.
We loved it!
We were in a sunshine spot between the Mission, Noe Valley, and the Castro. We lived right across the street from the J Church Muni line and we were within walking distance to lots of restaurants and shops.
We started with two cars, eventually got our motorcycle licenses, sold one car, and bought a cheap motorcycle that fit neither of us particularly well, thanks to Zeke being six feet tall and me being five-foot-five.
Eventually we bought a place in the Mission at Shotwell and 18th, becoming homeowners for the first time. We were part of the gentrification problem, but it was the only thing we could afford.
Despite the challenges we faced—homelessness, prostitution, litter, and parents double-parking while picking up their kids from the private school on the corner—we actively engaged with our neighbors and city services to be part of the solution, not the problem.
We continued to love it until a homeless man I thought I'd befriended, in a moment of incoherence, threw an empty Jack Daniel's bottle at me and my newborn while I was gardening in front of our building. We decided to leave and despite 9/11, we left San Francisco to raise our family on the Peninsula, in the suburbs.
But our love of city living never left us. When we travel, we love being either in the middle of a city or out in the middle of nowhere.
We've done month-long home exchanges in cities like Paris, Bordeaux, and Lyon, getting to know the neighborhoods, the shop owners, and the public transportation. Whenever we are in San Francisco, which has been a lot lately, we talk about what it would be like to live part-time in the City again. Or maybe another city somewhere else in the world.
When we were in Madrid in April, Zeke found us a wonderful Airbnb that, according to a woman who had lived there her entire life, used to be a neighborhood bakery. While we worked, we left the front door open, watching the neighborhood go by…strollers, dogs, little kids, older people, and everyone else. One woman, Rosy, and her dog, Limón, stopped to talk with us and shared the history of both the neighborhood and our building.
As we've traveled, the idea comes up every time we're in a city that feels livable. We love cities with great public transportation, beautiful parks, incredible architecture, great museums, and, of course, really nice people.
We found ourselves considering Madrid this spring and Munich the previous fall. Paris always comes up for me. We ruled out Lyon, but Bordeaux is still a definite contender.
Will we ever spend part of the year living in another city? I don't know. But given the dream we put out into the world in 1990, long before we knew our future would be together, and the fact that we made it come true once already, I wouldn't bet against us.
We still have a lot of life left to live and a lot of places to visit. Maybe we'll discover the next city we want to call home on our next trip.
❤️Terri
Check out our latest video, We Love City Life | Madrid, and come explore one of our favorite European cities with us.