Written 4-25-2021
Our memory-making, friend-generating, circuitous, enterprising, time-consuming love story, and agile solution for simply moving from Santa Monica, CA, to the Seattle, WA, area!
“Go West, young man!” Isn’t that what Horace Greeley said so long ago? It should be noted that when Sharon and I started our journey together there was just a big bunch of oceans west of us so we took him to mean ‘Actually, Go North’ and so we did!
Let’s quickly review our long migration north:
LOS ANGELES – After graduating from Arizona State University, I moved back to Los Angeles only to discover Sharon as I worked and wandered the hallways of Vivitar Corp in Santa Monica, CA. We found time to play and color in some pages together in Venice, Santa Monica, Hollywood, Brentwood, and Westwood. We called Sharon’s West Los Angeles neighborhood ‘Sharonwood’, and my West Los Angeles neighborhood was ‘Edwood!’
SAN FRANCISCO – Ultimately, we made the big move to move in together but since we already had colored in so much of the Los Angeles area we simply moved together to San Francisco. I say simply now but, at the time, I had temporarily migrated over to New York City for a year! Nonetheless, we combined our belongings and arrived together in the City by the Bay. For a long while we were another young bohemian couple in the big city. In time though, we married like many others, and moved to the suburbs.
RENO – While living in the North Bay my employer moved us, and the entire company, to Reno, NV. This was the only time so far that we lived off the West Coast Map, but there were plenty more adventures to colorize in Nevada with Reno, Sparks, Las Vegas, and enchanting Lake Tahoe!
PORTLAND – After visiting Portland, OR, for a trade show, it felt like a young San Francisco to me, so I tossed my resume up this way. As fate would have it a new company moved us to the outskirts of Portland! We have now had 10 years here to color in Portland, the Oregon and Washington coasts, the nearby Gorge, and Vancouver, WA!
SEATTLE – Now seems to be the best time to migrate north again with yet another company providing the financial platform to extend our northern migration! This feels like we are completing something enormous! During all our moves, Sharon’s brother and his family were living in Seattle this whole time, so now we can all color in things together! There is much more to experience and colorize everywhere you look again!
The distance from Santa Monica, CA, to Seattle, WA is only 1,135 miles. If you caught a flight, it would only take a little over two hours and you are already landing!
For us though, we didn’t fly.
Instead, it took us 41 years, three apartments, four houses, and enough career time to register our 10,000 hours to be experts in multiply areas including photography, customer service, administration, marketing, and sales! We were never going to take the rather bland shortest distance between two points. If we had traveled that way there would have been no time to add so much color and details to our love story, and we would not have so many funny stories, or so many festive friends in all those cities!
At our current rate we know we will eventually bump our foreheads into the Canadian border. At that point we get to decide if we want to color more activities to the left, color to the right, or color on the other side of the line straight ahead! Undoubtedly, we will post another update when we get there too!
Seattle area, here we come! What did we miss? We would have been there earlier, but it takes some serious time, you know, to color in the entire western side of the United States of America — all those beaches, forest, sunsets, mountain ranges, cities, towns, adventures, restaurants, attractions, and natural wonders! At this point, we have quite a colorful portfolio together from Santa Monica, CA, to Seattle, WA!
P.S. Our vivid vacations portfolio together includes multiple adventures both domestically, and internationally but that is a story for another day! Right now, it is time to start packing up all this stuff around us again!
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