Moving East

Let's rewind time a little bit. Six years to be precise. That puts me back in Los Angeles, packing up my truck and a small U-Haul trailer with everything I owned. I was about to set off on a relatively short ten hour drive to a place I knew nearly nothing about.

Everything I did between high school and my move to Utah had a temporary feel to it. Whatever continuity college offered was broken up by various summer jobs. My stint in Los Angeles was designed as a temporary reprieve from the start of the "real world". In fact, since I didn't know how to approach things any differently, my head was in the same place as I set off to graduate school. It's just another college experience, right? But as I have now said to many people, it is hard to argue that six years in one spot can be considered temporary.

In reality, it's not the time spent in Utah that has made it feel like home, but rather the collective events and milestones that have occurred here. Six years ago Kelly and I were living in separate states. Now we are married with a daughter that means the world to us. From mourning the loss of loved ones to growing our first tomato to bringing our daughter home from the hospital, the events that have transpired here, both momentous and mundane, make up a large percentage of our adult lives.

The fact that wacky wonderful Utah now feels like home made our decision to pack everything up and move to Maryland a tough one. A strange set of events led me to a job opportunity working at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station in Saint Mary's County, nested on a peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River. It is much more rural than we are used to, but just as we learned the ins and outs of Salt Lake City, we are looking forward to all that this new area will offer. We definitely have our sights set on some sailing and taking plenty of trips to Washington DC (a little over an hour away).

This move is a little different than any we have done before. For one, our belongings no longer fit in the back of my truck. But more importantly, this is the first time we are moving somewhere without a preexisting notion of how long we will be there. While the thought of putting down roots so far from our family is scary, the idea of being somewhere long enough to buy our first house is equally exciting. Though, we are still giving ourselves a year of renting to make sure we didn't make a huge mistake.

Right now our plans are to start packing on the 1st of September, start driving on the 4th (Kelly is going to get a head start by flying to Louisville, KY), and arrive at our new home in Leonardtown, MD on the 7th.

Here's to our next big adventure.