Homeward Bound

Recently, when people ask me about what’s going on in my life, it takes me a minute to come up with a coherent answer. In the last six months, we’ve sold our house, moved to a different house, moved out of that house, found out we were having a baby, I quit my job, we sold Andrew’s truck, Andrew officially got “out” of the military…then joined the National Guard, we watched all of Sherlock, finally made a decision about which baby stroller to buy, and we travelled a lot.

But most of this was necessary in order for us to move forward on a big life decision -- we were moving back to Oregon. Perhaps many of you know that we were always planning to move back to Oregon, but the idea was always so nebulous and far off to me. Further complicating things was the fact that we were actually happy in Georgia -- apart from the weather, we both liked our jobs, had good friends, a pub where we played Wednesday-night trivia, and I had adjusted to only ever drinking Starbucks lattes. But somewhere during our 4 years as southern expatriates, we became more convinced of the importance of being near family (sometimes I felt like I truly could not be farther away from my parents and still live in the continental United States). Our decision to have a baby cemented the preeminence of family, so while Andrew was deployed to Afghanistan, we began taking the necessary steps to leave the military (a complicated task, indeed!). While I'm leaving out a lot of details, as of the end of December, Andrew was officially on terminal leave and we began plotting our long road trip westward.

Though Andrew doesn't currently have a job (to answer the obvious question...), since he is on terminal leave from the military he still has a paycheck until March 1st. So we're not quite as crazy and capricious as we seem. Andrew has made Crossfit finding suitable employment his new full-time job and has had several phone interviews that have moved to in-person interviews once we finally arrive in Oregon. All that is to say, we're hopeful and we're trusting God, but we also have a little bit of time to figure things out until we're income-less, food-less, etc.

In the meantime, we're weaving down the highway in our 1996 Toyota Corolla that’s boasting a breezy 258,000 miles and we're adjusting to living out of our car for two weeks as "un-gypsy" like as possible, per Andrew's request.

We've got quite a few stops planned along the way, but we're officially headed your way, Oregon.