After a year of enjoying the sunshine of San Diego, we are finally finishing our road trip up the Pacific Coast. Our initial road trip plan in 2020 was to make it to the Pacific Northwest and find a new place to call home. The pandemic shut down so many places in March and we hunkered down in San Diego where we had been planning on a staying for a two week dog sit.

By May, we realized things weren’t getting better and we needed work. Justin found a sales job and I started building up my freelance work. We made the decision to stay here. Our two week stay turned into a long term rental with a quarantine pod that loved playing board games and watching movies outdoors. We made the best of a shitty year.

Ringing in 2021, we knew that we needed to figure out our next steps. After moving around so much the last few years and having this strange year of lock down, we both knew that we wanted to settle somewhere. The Pacific Northwest has been our dream for a while and we started to brainstorm ways to make that a reality.

Job hunting has been nuts this year with the unemployment rates high and so much uncertainty. But persistence pays off. Justin accepted a new job based in Seattle. With freelance work, it’s easy for me to change locations. At the time of this post, we will have set off on a new adventure. It seems fitting that the rain is falling here in Southern California, because it’s a bittersweet day.

For all the madness in the world, we have had a lot of good times in the last year and we will be forever grateful to the people we’ve met here. We are leaving a family and neighborhood that has gotten us through the pandemic. This will be a place we visit every year going forward. There is so much we haven’t been able to experience.

But we are also so excited for cooler summers, snow capped mountains and rainforests. We are excited to go furniture shopping, start new jobs and settle in to a new routine. And in the short term, we are excited to see something outside our car windows other than beautiful beaches and palm trees – I know, it seems wrong to even type that. But a change of scenery will be so good.

As we head up the 1, I’m sure there will be so many feelings. But we are celebrating the fact that we finally get to finish the trip we set out on last January – to find home.