WE MOVED TO… ATLANTA

Friday 1st December 2006

Natasha Holt

Carole Last, 40, a full-time mum, and her husband Tim, 38, who works for BT, moved from Maidstone, Kent, to Atlanta, Georgia, USA. They have three children, Carly, 19, Adam, 10, and Amy, nine.

How do your homes compare?
We'd just moved into a new four-bedroom house in Kent, which we bought for around £180,000, when Tim's work offered him a secondment to Atlanta. We paid around £215,000 for our home here but it's more than twice the size of our old house. It has five bedrooms and four bathrooms. There's very little crime in our suburb and it's incredibly clean.

What surprised you about Atlanta?
The extremes of weather are incredible. The thunderstorms are so dramatic and we have tornado warnings regularly. We've seen ice storms and have been hit by the edges of big hurricanes. The summer heat can reach 38°C, and it's extremely humid. I'd never been to America before, so I was expecting scenes from NYPD Blue but it's nothing like that. On the whole, people seem happier.

What about the schools?
My daughter Carly was 14 when we arrived and she found it hard to settle in. She went to a comprehensive school back in Maidstone but we managed to find a private school here which teaches the International Baccalaureate—an internationally recognised qualification. Here, children start school later, so Adam was put in a pre-kindergarten class—more like a playschool. Amy went to a playgroup for three hours a day.

How about healthcare?
All healthcare is private and tends to be expensive. Tim's company provides health insurance for the whole family, which costs about £113 a month. The quality of healthcare is very good though. Whenever I take the children to see the doctor, they get a head-to-toe check-up.

Is your diet different?
I had to learn to cook because the ready meals I relied on in the UK aren't available here. We do miss Marmite, custard, Cadbury's chocolate, Branston pickle and British sausages.

Are you better off financially?
Definitely. We pay less income tax and petrol is a third of the price. Utility bills are more expensive but telephone bills are cheap, so it's easy to keep in regular touch with relatives. We can go out for dinner more, too, and I can buy clothes at the shopping mall really cheaply.

How do you spend your leisure time?
We tend to go away for long weekends, as driving huge distances here is much easier and stress-free. We love exploring. We're only five hours' drive from the beautiful Gulf Coast in Florida so we go there two or three times a year. We also do the usual tourist attractions and support the Atlanta Braves , the local baseball team.