“Slepic Pirka” by Mig21
I have never really been a person that makes small life changes. Some people decide to go the gym a couple times a week, change the color of their hair, or to eat more yellow vegetables, but not I (though the gym wouldn’t hurt)
Ten years ago I decided to to move from on the Northeast to the Northwest armed with nothing but a credit card and my best friend. With cars donned with signs boasting “Oregon OR Bust” we headed West. Ambitiously, we made a pact to hacky sack in every state that we drove through. We hacked our last sack in Ohio before we realized how daunting a 3200 mile drive through 12 states was going to be. We survived one the worst heat waves that Chicago had seen in a long time, drove the worlds longest straight line through Nebraska, and pushed through car stopping updraft driving over the Rockies.
There is freedom in dropping everything and starting over. I can’t explain why I feel this way, maybe it has something to do with the day-to-day becoming mundane. Every five years, almost like clockwork, I get the itch. Five years ago, I gave up everything (except for a box of stuff most of which I didn’t even need) and moved from Oregon to Connecticut.
It also seems like the five year mark is also a pivotal moment in my own personal development. I left Vermont to go to Oregon to find myself. Having found myself, I had to leave Oregon before I lost myself. In Connecticut, or at least the act of moving there, put into a effect a chain reaction of events that catapulted me into my next stage of life: career, marriage, fatherhood, home ownership.
Yet the itch surfaced again, and fortunately my wife shares it. So, we scratched it.
In short we are selling the house, I changed jobs, and we are moving to the Czech Republic (where my wife Katerina is from). The reasons are three fold:
1) We want to give our daughter and Czech family a chance to bond (which means that my wife and I can go on dates again)
2) Give me a chance to really experience the culture, get photographically inspired again, and turn my career up a notch.
3) Shit, it is the heart of freakin’ Europe! – who the hell wouldn’t want to go.July 12th the next journey begins. !
So, keep any eye on this space as I am going to try and document the move and life after the USA!