After the last update on New Year's, which focused on primarily just the updates through Thanksgiving and of course, Ohio State/Michigan weekend, I had every intention on updating this guy at least once a month. Well, that didn't happen. Kind of a lot has happened since then. Let's take a peek at what the past 6 months has had in store for us to get us caught up to where we are today.
Christmas
In December, we celebrated Christmas. Little did we know, this would be the last Christmas and the last winter in Florida at the time. We went about our Christmas just like we normally have. We didn't have any visitors this Christmas, but the boys enjoyed every minute of it just the same. The video is going to be a 6 month recap, so it will be quite long and carry us through the entire picture run through of the holiday.
New Years
New Years rolled around and at this point, there was starting to be a bit of a vibe around the possibility of the family moving to the Northeast for a potential job opportunity. We already knew at this point that leaving Jacksonville was likely and that leaving Florida was possible, but we believed that this would likely involve us relocating to another part of Florida or back to Ohio with the same bank I was with. For the first time, it seemed increasingly likely that the Mid Atlantic and New England areas could also enter that mix. Knowing that this was possible, we celebrated New Years knowing that 2014 was going to be life altering for the whole family in ways that we couldn't even imagine at this point. Charlotte came to visit early in the new year and got to enjoy one last visit to Jacksonville before everything would flip upside down.
My Birthday and the Super Bowl
By early February, I had an opportunity present itself that led to a job interview being set or Boston, MA. It was a tremendous opportunity that was very similar to the ones that we were exploring in other parts of Florida and Ohio, but this one would allow me to move closer to my brother and his family putting the boys much closer to their cousins. On the flipside, it would require a change of companies. While that is always an adjustment, the new company would be one of the largest and most prestigious companies on the planet. The weekend we typically celebrate my birthday, we had another interesting opportunity arise. I was offered an opportunity to join my brother at the Super Bowl in New York City on behalf of the company I was to be interviewing with and providing me with a chance to meet many of the top performers and company leaders that would be in attendance. Of course, I couldn't pass on what can only be described as the opportunity of a lifetime. A chance to attend the Super Bowl with my brother, something we both thought we might never do. The Super Bowl was amazing. The entire experience was something a person that has ever had the chance to attend will never forget. But it also began to lay the groundwork for what was to come with the family's relocation.
The Week that Changed Everything
Late February came and I was off to Boston. After a couple days touring the area and getting a feel for the market, where I could be working and where I could be living, as well as spending some time with my Brother and his family, I then spent an entire day on Friday interviewing for my new job. 7 interviews in 8 hours not counting two phone interviews led to a final determination. The job was offered, the wife was consulted, we accepted, and I would fly home knowing that our life was about to change forever. We were moving to Boston.
March
The month of March was interesting. So much to do and so little time. We had laid out a pretty detailed plan just preparing for the fact that if this happened, we would have a short time to execute a very complex undertaking. Packing up the family, arranging for a cross country move of the entire family and our pets, finding a place to live in Boston, arranging to turn our Florida home into a rental, and securing a new job for Antoinette across the country, all while wrapping things up with my former employer and preparing for the new undertaking at my new employer. The month was long, complicated, and seemingly full of ups and downs, as you can expect, but at the end of the day, we stayed right on schedule and when April rolled around, we were ready to hit the road. The month was filled with many "last times" for us, including trips to our favorite beaches and favorite restaurants. Good bye dinners with our friends and co-workers whenever we could, countless goodbyes to all of those relationships we had built over the years, and of course a final road trip to Cape Canaveral to see it before we left the State for at least a decade of more. The trip was amazing. The Cape is worth every penny. More complication with the dogs, but we made it through. The opportunity to see a Space Shuttle in person, just 5-10 feet away, to walk under Saturn V rockets, touch a rock from the Moon, and countless other exhibits, was amazing. You can see it all in a day, but it was nothing short of lifetime full of memories.
April 5th
When April 5th arrived, we were ready for it. The movers had come and packed and loaded the entire house and they were gone with all of our stuff. We arranged to purchase a new car in Boston and sold our 160,000 mile Acura in Florida to avoid the need to lug it along for the car ride. Now all that was left was our final night in the house on the 4th (pizza party on the floor of our empty home before crashing out in a hotel) and then figuring out a way to load all of the final items into a minivan for the drive across the country. There was the hiccup of finding out at the last minute when we tried to check into the hotel on the 4th that Antoinette had accidentally thrown out my Florida Driver's License, meaning we had to get another one last minute. But we managed and on the 5th, we arrived back at the house in the morning, loaded up the final items, picked up the dogs, somehow managed to shove them in the back of the loaded up minivan, got the kids in and situated, said goodbye to the house that had served us well for 7 years, filled with all of the memories of Florida, our kids every waking minute, and the true start of our life together as a married couple, and left pulled out of the driveway for the very last time. We were off and the next destination was Boston.
The Drive
The drive to Boston was fairly uneventful, other than the refreshing of our previous understanding of why we don't travel with dogs. We couldn't see or do very much because the dogs were with us the entire time. That being said, there were some interesting parts of the trip. For one, we made good time on the first day and by nightfall, we had made it to the Chesapeake Bridge and Tunnel System. For those of you who have never experienced this, I would recommend a day time drive over a night time drive, but either is fascinating. It is a toll system, so there is a fare to pay to make the drive, but at the end of the day, you are driving over something like 17 miles of bridges and tunnels that lead under the Bay. You are constantly going up and down over and under the water on two lane roads. The purpose of the system is to provide access across the Bay from one part of Virginia to the other, but to do so without creating a potential block that would prevent Naval vessels from getting out of the harbor that houses the largest Naval Base in the world and most of our Aircraft Carriers (therefore most of the Aircraft Carriers in the world). By having sporadic tunnels under the water, no matter what would happen to the Bridge, the tunnels would allow the ships to still get out and not be trapped. There is a restaurant in the middle but it was closed by the time we got there. We stayed the night on the Virginia side and had a decent night's sleep. By Virginia, the temps had dipped dramatically overnight, and there was no doubt we were heading north. The next leg of the trip had us driving up to Connecticut and doing so by driving right through the heart of New York City. We planned on taking a route that would give us a great view of the Statue of Liberty, but were diverted somehow to the heart of Manhattan. Next thing you know, we are sitting in traffic looking up out our windows as the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, Freedom Tower. At least I believe that is still the name they chose for it. It was an amazing experience. Just commuting along in a jam packed minivan with Florida plates, and out the window we are sitting in front of a building 1/3 of a mile tall. We continued our drive and made it to a hotel on top of a small mountain/hill in Connecticut, across the street from the Bell Helicopter factory. At this point, the temps were down pretty low and the landscape had changed dramatically. It was a beautiful landscape, with low hills, lots of forests and streams, rivers and rock walls everywhere. The final leg of the trip took us through Rhode Island and Providence and into the northwestern Boston suburbs where we stopped at my Brother Rick's to see his family and setup our temporary housing for the next two weeks while we finalized a place to stay. The trip was long, at about 1,300 miles, and took us through Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, a small piece of Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and finally to Massachusetts. 12 States in 3 days (and the next day we would be in New Hampshire looking at rental properties making 13 States in 4 days). What a trip.
April
In April, we spent the month getting situated at my Brother's, getting situated at my new job, looking for a property to rent, looking for a job for Antoinette, and letting the boys spend countless hours with the cousins that prior to this, they had only seen for a week here and there during Family Reunions. It was a lot to adjust to in such a short time, but one step at a time, things began to fall into place. Within a couple weeks, we had found our new property to rent and call home for a year, had changed property managers in Florida from one of incompetence to one that better fit our needs, had moved the family into the new place, had all of our items delivered by the movers from storage, had picked up our new car, had Billy's birthday party with his cousins, had a party for Tina, my sister-in-law, and even took the boys to their first ever baseball game. Box seats at Fenway Park. What better way to break them into the sport than at one of the most historic parks in the nation. April was a roller coaster, but it was fun.
May
May has been a calming down of sort. Life has begun to work itself back into a routine. Antoinette is finalizing her job situation, the property in Florida is one step closer to being rented, the boys got to go to their cousin's baseball game to watch him play, and we had two opportunities to get out to the beach on a couple beautiful weekends. It is hard to wrap your head around the lack of humidity this close to the ocean after living in Florida for so long, but it is basically non-existent to us. The beaches are not Florida beaches, instead more gravel like sand or littered with large rocks. There are rocks everywhere in this area. My brother lives at the bottom of a hill which houses two old quarries and is filled with massive boulders of pure granite. The beaches are similarly covered with rocks that look like river rock, smooth and rounded, ranging in size from pebbles to the size of Volvos. The roads back where we live are like right out of a car commercial. Winding and forested, low speeds and over creeks, past lakes and beautiful homes tucked into the hilly countryside. The towns are small and quaint, with homes from the 1700's and 1800's, churches at least as old, and a history unlike anything we have ever seen in Florida. By July, we should be completely settled in and the real exploring should begin.
Well, detail was certainly lacking, but as you can see, the last 6 months have been filled with dozens of life altering experiences. Tough to limit them all to a blog entry, but I think I've managed to recap. The video is probably going to be 30 minutes due to all of the changes and the pictures that go with them, but that should allow us to reset the family now that we are settling into the Boston area. More detail coming in the June recap.
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