Moving is not a lot of fun. Leaving your home of over twenty years is even less fun. Yet my wife and I did just that a few years ago.
While I really wanted to move, my wife was letting me live one of my dreams.
There are a lot of people who can be born in area, live there all their life, and be very happy. Some of those folks travel to see new places, and others are perfectly happy never getting more than a few hundred miles from home.
I doubt that I was born with wanderlust, but I know that I was born without the fear of new places. From my earliest days I can remember studying maps and wondering what might be found at a particular crossroads.
When I was seventeen, another friend who was twenty and I drove around the United States in three weeks. It was a grand trip for two young guys. We saw Yellowstone, Glacier, Crater, and lots of other parks. We drove through LA traffic, drove by Hoover Dam when it so hot that our Polaroid film almost melted, and we rolled into Las Vegas early one Sunday morning. We even drove straight through from Carlsbad New Mexico to Myrtle Beach. I can still remember stopping for breakfast outside of New Orleans.
Later as a college student, another friend and I took all summer to drive to Alaska and back. It was the trip of a lifetime. We slept on four inch thick foam mattresses under the cap of my Dodge PowerWagon. I came back with a taste for the wilderness.
After graduating from Harvard, instead of going to Law School, I scraped up a little over $6,000 and bought an old farm with a barn and 140 acres. Some roommates from college helped me to gut the place and remodel it. While gardening there and taking care of a few head of cattle, I decided that I wanted to farm.
My new wife and I investigated a good chunk of Atlantic Canada including a secluded valley in Newfoundland where we had to go by float plane. We ended up twenty miles north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. We farmed there for over ten years, and then we decided that we need a more secure future for our children.
Eventually I took a job with Apple Computer, moved back to Nova Scotia, where we lived in Halifax for two years. Then we moved to Columbia, MD and eventually to Roanoke, Virginia where we stayed for twenty years.
In 2004, I decided that I needed to see some new horizons. Eventually in 2006 we moved to the western side of Carteret County.
So here we are four years later in Carteret County, and I absolutely love the area. It is not that I did not like the Roanoke area. I thought it was a great place to raise a family. We lived on a mountainside above the city, and I will always have some great memories of that home and of Roanoke.
However, it was time to move on and to stretch out of our comfort zone once again. Are there risks in moving to a new place? Yes, and it is something you should not undertake unless you have the ability to re-create yourself in a new place.
We moved to this area, knowing only our real estate agents. Yet we now have a number of friends and are close to being as comfortable with the area as we were with Roanoke where we lived twenty years.
My wife and I have a very strong relationship so in times of challenges, we can and do lean on each other. There are times in moving when even the best of relationships will be challenged.
Many things that you take for granted in your old home have to researched and recreated. We have learned to make creating a life in a new place a shared journey. My wife and I both take responsibility for making our life here in Carteret County a success.
We have found it to be a good place to live. Modern services are convenient to our location. We have found a great church, and I have had some success in my real estate business and even more in my writing.
Beyond that, we once again live in a place of unparalleled beauty. Just driving across the Emerald Isle bridge for some gas can renew my soul.
Pressing a button on the lift behind our home puts our boat in the water and opens a whole new world for us. The waters of the White Oak River, Bogue Sound, and Bogue Inlet are minutes from our backdoor.
The blue skies and crystal clear waters along the beaches make this an attractive place to call home. I have no regrets about pulling up stakes and moving here.
The opportunity to live and grow in a new and possibly better place is what the American dream is all about to me.
While I am likely hardwired for moving, plenty people who have not moved nearly as much as me will find the Crystal Coast an inviting place to live. I encourage you to trust in your abilities and make the move if it makes sense for your family.
