In addition to the excellent advice above, I'd suggest that you think about telecommuting (if location is indeed such a problem) and maybe freelancing. Setting up one's own business is daunting, but IMHO there are enough jobs in the Perl world to support a talented programmer working from home. Especially with the kind of transition you appear to be going through (you're still working with the company for x months but know your employment will cease after that) you should have enough time to ramp up on the skills necessary for such work (and by that I don't just mean programming skills but things like communication, selling your services well, planning a business and so forth) and maybe even already land a few small jobs in advance. If you don't want to take the full plunge, you can also quite often find telecommuting full-time jobs advertised on jobs.perl.org, so maybe one of those will suit you?. Anyway, good luck.

OTOH, if your mind is set on exploring a new language (and there is a lot of good in that, even if you should decide to return to mainly Perl in the long run) I'd suggest looking for an industry you'd like to be employed in and learning the language that is most often used there. It's important to have fun at what you do for work, so keep that in mind when choosing which path to take.