To Cali Cali. Original. I know. This month my husband and I are making the Haul back to California after five adventure (I loosely use the word “adventure”) filled years away from it. We originally moved to to Charleston, South Carolina and then from there to Chicago, Illinois. We wanted to take advantage of being young, in love, and without kids. I had also finished college with a degree in psychology and no official plans to use it, while he had graduated from culinary school and had every intention of putting that to good use.
His intention was to cook and learn cuisine and culture in other parts of the country to bring back home (California) with us in hopes of having expanded knowledge for one day opening our own restaurant. My plan was to find a job a that paid the bills and enjoy living in different parts of the country. It was exciting for us and for our families, because we were the first in a couple of generations to get out of our hometowns. Sounds so small-town, doesn’t it? We are not from a small-town, but a nice suburb of the East Bay Area, when we share that with people in other states they can’t comprehend why we would ever leave it. The answer is simple, it has been such a growing opportunity for us that I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t take a year or two off from where they grew up. If you’re thinking “Money, maybe?” you’re wrong. We moved across the country with barely $1000 together and we’ve made it work for 5 years without ever once asking our parents for help.
So, now that we have had this amazing cross country adventure together, we have decided that it is time to settle down sightly and move back home. I have been at the same job for almost 8 years transferring from location to location and has fulfilled his desire to learn new cuisine. The only downside about spending the past few years traveling is that we haven’t had an opportunity to lay roots anywhere or save money to build towards our future and our potential business. Not to mention my sister has a new baby girl that turned 2 months old yesterday that I have yet to meet, which is tearing away at my heart.
It is with the most bittersweet of feelings that my husband and I began packing our 375 square foot apartment this month to begin our haul back home. I’m grateful for all that I learned along the way and I can’t wait to see what moving home to be with our families again can teach us. Honestly, I CAN wait a little bit to have outside influence and added family pressure thrown into our marriage that hasn’t been there the whole time we have been married, but it’s all part of the adventure, I suppose.
An Aspiring Wanderer 