Driving past the mountains, creeks, and rivers near her home in southwestern Germany, Kate Raidt says the scenery still catches her attention. She jokes that she’s “probably the only soccer mom from America who loves away games.”
Raidt looks forward to the drive from Ulm, the city where she lives, to Munich for her teenage son’s soccer commitments. “It’s really hard to be in a bad mood when you’re driving through all of this beauty,” she says.
“When you can look out and see the Swiss Alps or hear water running because of a creek or a river nearby, that is something that makes me so happy,” Raidt, originally from Atlanta, tells CNN Travel.
‘Ready, set, go’
A year and a half after relocating from the US to Germany with her son Bodie, Raidt says the move has gone “way better than anybody could have imagined,” and that both are thriving.
Living close to natural sights like the Danube River and the Bavarian Alps has reshaped her daily routine. She’s constantly on the move — hiking, cycling along the Danube, visiting thermal spas or going “castle hunting” with her son.
“That’s probably the biggest landslide win for being over here,” she says, praising a lifestyle she feels is focused less on quantity and more on quality.
”My physical health. My mental health… Having such easy, quick physical activity at my fingertips completely saved me.”
The decision to relocate began with her son’s opportunities. Bodie, a skilled soccer player, had been invited to try out for several German clubs and received offers.
Although Raidt had visited Germany often — her daughter was born there during her marriage to a German native — she hadn’t planned to move back permanently. But her son’s ambitions changed her thinking.
She told him they would wait until his older sister Conley left for college. “I didn’t want him living alone with a host family, so I decided to go with him,” she says.
A few weeks after her daughter graduated in 2024, Raidt and Bodie left the US for Germany.
They started out in an Airbnb in Ulm, a historic city based between Munich and Stuttgart, where Bodie joined a local team. “I literally had two suitcases,” Raidt says. “We had no friends. No family. No nothing… So, it was just ready, set, go. Let’s make this happen.”
Raidt says she soon realized she had a lot to learn. One of her first challenges was education. Bodie holds dual nationality but wasn’t able to enroll in a German high school as “he didn’t have enough foreign language experience.”
He eventually joined an international school, which Raidt says was a turning point. She bonded quickly with other expat parents.
“We’ve all left our home countries and come here,” she says. Their emotional support, Raidt adds, has helped her through difficult times.
‘Defined culture’
As Raidt settled in, she gained a deeper appreciation for life in Germany outside her remote work for a US-based company.
She loves the fact that “people constantly get together for coffee,” in contrast to the US, where “everyone zips through the Starbucks drive-thru.”
“America only has one city out of the whole entire place that really has a defined culture, and that’s New Orleans,” she says. “So, Germany kind of reminds me of that.”
But there are downsides, she admits. She dislikes the amount of cigarette smoking and finds some aspects of daily life too rigid, too “black and white.”
Bureaucracy has also been tricky to navigate due to the “constant stress of going to government offices and standing in line.”
“Getting a driver’s license in Germany is like passing the bar exam or getting a medical license,” she says.
Securing a family reunification visa, which allows family members to join a relative who is a legal resident in Germany, was “long and challenging” and required her to sign up for German health insurance, which costs her around $1,300 a month.
She says some people in Germany “simply hate immigrants,” and treat her differently because of her US accent.
Still, she says the overall experience with Germans has been positive. She’s made “wonderful friends,” especially among parents on her son’s soccer team.
“None of them really speak any English,” says Raidt. “But it’s forced me to improve my German and kind of meet in the middle.”
Raidt had conversational German from her earlier visits, but she needed to improve her skills to cope with basic events like handling rental contracts, doctors’ appointments and official documents. She now takes a four-hour daily language course as she aims to pass the fluency exam she needs for citizenship.
“There’s days where I’m like, ‘This is going to literally send me to my grave,’” she says. “But at the same time, it gets me out of bed.”
For anyone considering a move abroad, Raidt advises choosing a place where where they speak the language already.
“I learned very quickly that if you’re going to live somewhere your language better be better than conversational level,” she says. “Or it’s very hard.”
Big wins
Raidt finds Germany expensive, especially utilities and notes that “everything’s a little bit smaller” now including her car and her home. But that shift, she says, has clarified what she needs
She felt the difference sharply when she returned to the US for an extended stay in the spring. Sliding back into old habits — driving everywhere, sitting at a desk all day — left her “overwhelmed with emotions and stress.”
“Even though I still had the same stress in my life, it didn’t nearly affect me as much once I got back here,” she says. “I think it’s because I was constantly physically moving and getting so much more exercise. It just kept me so sane.”
Raidt has recently revived a former passion. She’s recording an album two decades after turning her back on music.
“So at age 54 and no music in my life for 20 years, I’m bringing it back with a vengeance!” she says.
Raidt doesn’t miss much about Atlanta, she says, but does yearn for her “mom friends” and had cravings for US fast food like Chick-fil-A.
She returns to the US as often as she can to visit Conley, who plays college tennis in Nebraska. Meanwhile, Bodie seems to be thriving — a huge relief for Raidt.
“Even if I loved it here, if he was miserable, we’d have to get out of here,” she says. “Because this is all for him. So the biggest win-win is that he’s been doing really well… And it was a big kind of lifestyle upgrade for me.”
The pair currently live in a three-bedroom townhouse on the “mountain side” of Ulm, plan to stay in Germany for “at least two more years,” until Bodie graduates from high school.
Raidt says that the sale of her home in Atlanta felt like the closing of the final chapter of her life in the US, and she doesn’t “have an interest in coming back.”
She’s unlikely to stay in Ulm once her son leaves, but she’s open to staying in Europe.
“Maybe I go to Austria,” she says. “Maybe I go to Switzerland. Maybe I go to Spain… I don’t know. But I would love to keep exploring Europe. I would really love to stay over here.”