The Decision

By the end of July, Bear and I were still unsure of what lay ahead of us. However, we had to make a decision, and we had two choices. To stay in Utah for the next year or move back to New Jersey. Both had its pros and cons. Utah- we already lived in the state. No big moving costs. But we didn’t love living in Utah. New Jersey- we would get amazing health insurance. Bear would be around his academic crowd. But we would have a huge moving expense. We weighed all of our options. 

Over. And. Over. And.Over. We thought we had made our final decision, which was to stay in Utah. But after sitting on that decision for a couple days we decided to re-evaluate. Something wasn’t feeling right to either of us about staying in Utah and we wanted to be 100% sure about this decision.

Again, we created a pros and cons list. But this time the pros for moving back to New Jersey outweighed the cons. We deducted the huge moving expense from the New Jersey cons list because we thought we could move across country with only what fit in our Ford Focus. We would have to ship a couple things but we were determined to make it work. The decision was finalized and we both felt good about it. We were New Jersey bound in just a few short weeks.

Now the problem we were going to run into was the very short time period we had to find a house to live in once we arrived in New Jersey, figure out what we were taking, and how we were going to pack everything into our fairly small car. We wrote out every type of to-do list and started checking things off as quickly as we could. The search for finding a place to live proved to be a lot harder than expected. With only five days left until we said goodbye to Utah our living arrangements in New Jersey were still unknown. We were preparing ourselves to be 'homeless' when we arrived. But graciously my Dad stepped in and found us the perfect house in the perfect location. We literally signed the lease and sent a deposit the day before we were starting our journey to the east. Once that was all finalized everything else didn’t seem so daunting.

Next on the list was figuring out what we should take. We had VERY limited space so we had to be extremely choosy as to what we brought. One day I will write an entire post on how we did this. It might be useful to someone else that finds themselves in the same situation. But for now, I will tell you that we cut back on shoes, clothes, and even my nail polish collection.

^Saying goodbye to all of our stuff in the storage unit. Shento relaxing on top of the piles of clothes.^

By this point both Bear and I were running on adrenalin. I don't even remember having feelings or attachments towards anything we had to leave behind. I just remember thinking that we had a mission (and time frame) and we had to accomplish it. We made piles of things we were taking and piles of stuff that needed to go back into our storage unit. We did a couple test runs to make sure everything fit in our car. It's amazing how packing becomes more of a creative art when you have limited space. 

^The test run to make sure everything fit in our car.^

It was almost go time. We felt pretty confident we had done everything we needed to do to make this journey a successful one.  We had checked everything off of our lists, brought the final stuff to the storage unit, and shipped a couple 50+ lb. boxes to New Jersey. 

It was go time. And we were ready.