> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://abroad.mrhudsonexplores.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Where should we, specifically, go?
- URL: https://abroad.mrhudsonexplores.com/briefings/where-should-we-specifically-go/
- Published: 2026-09-11T08:45:56.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-11T08:45:56.000Z
- Description: Why the biggest move of your life gets worse research than a two-week vacation — and what we built instead. The founding essay.
- Author: Bastiaan Ellen

Mr Hudson turns ten this year — a publication for gay men and the wider LGBTQ+ community first, and for the past five years a travel design practice: clients who notice when research is thin, and who ask questions brochures can't answer. When their conversations started ending with *"honestly, we've been thinking about leaving altogether,"* I stopped hearing it as small talk.

I should say plainly why those conversations multiplied. For a lot of LGBTQ+ Americans, the last few years have turned a daydream into a planning question. When your marriage, your healthcare, or your child's paperwork becomes something courts and legislatures argue about, you start doing a particular kind of math — not out of panic, but out of prudence. Safety, dignity and predictability are not dramatic asks. They are the minimum conditions of an ordinary life, and it is reasonable to want to know where they can be counted on. That's the question this service exists for, and I won't pretend it's about the weather.

So people start researching. And here is what I watched happen, over and over, to smart, capable households: the research made them *less* sure.

## The internet answers a different question.

Search "best countries for LGBTQ moving abroad" and you'll find no shortage of answers. What you won't find is anyone accountable for them. The listicles are built to rank in search results, not to be right. The visa guides are written once and refreshed never — undated, so you can't even tell. The forums are generous and sincere and describe a rule as it stood when one particular person applied, at one consulate, in one year. And the polished relocation sites are very often sales funnels for something else — property, insurance, a visa-filing package — which means the country they recommend has a way of being the country they monetize.

None of this is a scandal. It's just what content is. But a household deciding where the next thirty years happen is not a content problem — and for our community, the errors aren't cosmetic. Whether a country's immigration desk recognizes your marriage; whether your husband's parentage of your child survives the move; whether the healthcare system will continue prescriptions without a fight — get these wrong and you don't lose an afternoon. You lose years, money, and sometimes the plan itself.

## A move deserves at least the rigor of a vacation.

Here is the strange thing about my industry: for a two-week trip, a good travel designer will verify whether the hotel's renovation actually finished, whether the ferry runs on Sundays in October, whether the restaurant that anchors your anniversary dinner still deserves to. We call properties. We check dates. We don't forward brochures.

At some point the absurdity became impossible to ignore: the two-week trip was getting more careful research than the permanent move. The most important journey our travelers were planning was the one nobody was researching properly — least of all the industries positioned to profit from it.

Abroad is that discipline, pointed at the bigger question.

## What "researched properly" means here.

It means every claim is checked against primary sources — statutes, official gazettes, government fee tables — and carries the date we checked it, so you know exactly how fresh the ground is under any statement we make.

It means written law and lived practice are labeled as the different things they are. What a statute says and what a consulate does are not the same thing, and treating them as one is how careful people end up surprised.

It means we corroborate with practitioners in-country, in writing, and credit them — lawyers and advisers who handle these cases weekly, answering our specific questions on the record rather than being vaguely gestured at.

And it means that when professionals disagree — and on the questions that matter, they do — we tell you they disagree, and what each position would mean for you. This month, on one working route into one of our countries, we hold current, conflicting signals from practitioners we trust. The honest report says exactly that. The confident blog post, meanwhile, says whatever it said the day it was written.

## The economics of telling the truth.

Every research product should answer one question before you trust it: what is this company paid for? We're paid for the research — a flat fee for the report — and for designing travel, which we've done for five years and are not shy about. We are not paid by property developers, visa mills, or foreign governments courting migrants.

That independence buys the sentences most relocation content can't afford. *This country is wrong for your household, and here's why.* *This route everyone recommends has quietly stopped working.* *You shouldn't move at all — not yet.* When we're the wrong product for your case, we say that too, before any money changes hands; it's the cheapest thing we ever tell you.

It's also why we initially cover nine countries, not ninety. Anyone can cover the whole world thinly — depth is the entire point, and nine is what we can hold to the standard above. It's a starting point, not the destination: the map grows as our readers' lives do.

## One household at a time.

All of this exists so we can answer the question the internet can't: not "what are the best countries," but *where should we, specifically, go* — your passports, your money, your work, your family, your non-negotiables. That answer is the Abroad Dossier: your shortlist ranked and argued, the routes as they actually work, and a twelve-month path sequenced so every step buys information before it spends commitment. And when research narrows the world to a shortlist, the travel house my husband and I built does what it has always done — puts you in the candidate city, at Tuesday pace, to test what the research said to test.

We published a complete sample Dossier, verification notes and all, because the sample says more than any promise could. Read it before you spend a dollar with us.

## The next thirty years.

I'm Dutch. My husband is American, and British along the way. Between us we've made this decision — where should life happen next — more times than most, and I can tell you the moment it stops being frightening: it's the moment the facts arrive with sources, and the question shrinks from *everywhere* to *these places, for these reasons, in this order* — however many places your life actually allows.

The world is wide. If you're circling the question, the monthly briefing is free, and it will keep you honestly informed until you're ready. When you are: let's narrow it down.

— Bastiaan Ellen, Co-founder *September 11, 2026*