I'm home

70.4 mph avg. speed is hardly accurate...damn LA traffic and city streets along the way messed that up

After 1,205 miles, driving 17 hours and 52 minutes over 2 days I'm home. How does it feel? Great.

Immediately, here are my observations in the first few days...

This has yet to be proven as "difficult" as one would expect for uprooting a life and moving away from a place and a life established over 9 years. Maybe that answers whether I think I made the "right" decision in leaving California. Maybe it hints at what my ultimate decision will be, as well.

I love the weather. The drive up provided fantastic weather and a stop in Portland was a perfect PNW summer day. Sunday, however, it was a typical PNW fall day (on August 29th...go figure) but I loved it. Light jacket, jeans, hat on an overcast and windy day...I'll take that any day. Today it's cold and raining and I couldn't care less; I'm loving it.  It might get old and I might miss 80-degree days being the norm but right now I can't get enough.

It is so much f*cking cleaner up here it's sick. No trash on the sides of the road, no graffiti, no beat-to-hell roads, no '83 Datsun pickups piled 6' high with recyclables or junk, the sky is blue, the air clean...I could go on and on but you get the point.

People drive faster than I remember, which is a good thing. Everyone in SoCal drives like a bat out of hell and you just sort of go with the speedy flow of traffic and it always seems like people do that up here but at 60-65mph. Well, it would seem that a lot of CA transplants have spread the speeding gospel and the WA folk are eating it up and seeing that the grass really is greener the faster you drive. Win.

Tortillas are not found at every restaurant. Muy bueno.

My packing several pairs of sandals is laughable as is the thin selection of long-sleeved items I've amassed in SoCal.

I miss Brisbane.

I miss the ocean.

I feel like a kid again.

More thoughts later...