Looking Back...

So, we made it through our first few months in North Carolina at the therapeutic group home...but honestly we barely made it out alive! (and still together).

It was pretty rough (long story that isnt fun to tell or hear about) and after only 4 months we left North Carolina when the group home was unexpectedly, but gratefully shut down by the state. We had planned on being in north carolina for at least one year and had only been vaguely kicking around the idea of moving to the southwest (arizona, new mexico or maybe southern utah) once we finsihed our stint running the group home. murv had been doing a lot of research and had just settled on the idea of Marfa Texas http://www.marfatx.com/ because its remoteness, very afffordable acreage and conduciveness to making building materials out of recycled, shredded paper. I figured I had at least 9 months to come up with a better idea and talk him out of that one...

BUT, When the group home all of the sudden got closed and we were out of a job and a place to live we had about three days to come up with a plan...and since marfa was fresh on his mind as part of our plan for down the road, he exclaimed "I think we need to move to Texas!"

I smiled and said "hmmm... Texas, that might be an idea." but I was thinking "there is no way in hell I could LIVE in Texas."

The very next day we ran across the National Geographic ( http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0702/feature2/) (click on photo gallery for pictures) and they happened to have just done a huge spread on Big Bend National park and West Texas. It looked a lot better than I imagined it in my head.

We decided it was a sign for us to head in that direction. Since I was open to the possibilities but very skeptical about the likelihood that I could flourish as a human being in a place as remote as Marfa, I agreed to check it out, on the condition that if I hated it, we would keep heading west.

When we went to get a moving van to pack up all our stuff they wanted a final destination. Hmmm...

We decided we would set it for St. Gearge Utah, and rented it for 14 days-- That gave us two weeks and a few thousand miles to figure things out. We determined that if I couldn't handle Texas and we didn't have a location and a plan by the time we got to St. George we'd just put everything in storage and figure it out from there. And that was almost exactly one year ago today... :)

(The picture is of me and dru with our moving van on our exodus out of north carolina somewhere between chapel hill and charlotte where we stayed with my bff crit's mom and dad our first night after we left-- as you can see i was feeling very liberated, even though i was a liitle scared of all the unknowns)