New Adventure

Life feels surreal right now. I just applied to rent a house in Alaska. My current home isn't even sold, yet we are moving next week.

In May our life turned upside down when we accepted an offer to check out a job opportunity in Alaska. Our initial response was, "No, we are fine, we like our life in Idaho and are not looking to relocate to Alaska." However, it wouldn't leave us alone, in the back of our minds we were still thinking about it and finally decided to at least look into it. So off we went on an impromptu trip to Alaska. Jeremy spent his 40th birthday on an airplane traveling to Alaska.

After a brutal week of listing the pros and cons and none of it making sense we choose to go for it - to turn our lives upside down, to move as far away as possible from family (as if Florida hadn't been far enough away), to move to the cold and the dark and for what -- a feeling, a deep burning feeling that it is absolutely the right thing for our family.

For the first week after our decision I felt absolute peace, a calmness and was sure that we made the right decision. Unfortunately that feeling didn't stay and major stress replaced it. We had an emotionally rough summer - June, July and August were tormenting months and I (and Jeremy, we took turns) no longer felt the same certainty. It seemed like if we were making the right decision for our future that every thing should just fall into place and it would be easy.

But, not all good things are easy and smooth sailing. Much of my emotional stress was my own fault - I was trying to force things to fall into place, like wanting our house to sell sooner (that's been the biggest stress by far) and trying to find a decent place to rent. Looking back I shouldn't have given any thought to those two things until now, starting too early on those things just brought unneeded stress.

The other major stress has been how to get us and our stuff up to Alaska - a moving company, going by ferry, driving through Canada. We've decided to drive with our stuff through Canada on a five day moving trip. Is that the best decision? I don't know. One thing I know for certain is that there have been no easy answers, no obvious answers, every question, every decision has been thoroughly talked over multiple times and each time we come back to the beginning not knowing what decision to make. Just typing this up makes me feel the stress of it all again.

The one thing I know right now is that when I applied for the rental I felt good about it and I feel good about moving next week. People keep asking me if I'm excited about moving. I haven't been able to feel excited because I've been too stressed, had too many decisions to make. I think next week I'll be able to start feeling excited about it all.

I am looking forward to a new adventure. However, I leave Idaho with a heavy heart. We have made so many wonderful friends here. Florida wasn't as hard to leave. We have and had many wonderful friends there, but most of them were students, like we were, and they too left and moved on to other places. Here, in Idaho we are the ones leaving and I'm sad, my kids are sad and it's harder.

So, to all my Idaho friends, I love you, thank you so much for loving me, I will always love you and I'm not leaving you, I'm taking you with me in my heart.