New Beginnings

They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. So how many steps does a journey of ten thousand miles begin with? A lot more than ten, I’ll tell you that.

How did we get here to begin with? A man gets his PhD in Chemical Engineering and starts looking for a job as all responsible boys do. He has several prospects, and on a whim (and his wife’s urging), applies for one I’ll-never-get-this-in-a-million-years-but-why-not-try position in Melbourne, Australia. Well you can guess how that story turns out, because here we are.

It wasn’t pretty getting this far, though. First of all, we left our beloved Boulder, Colorado, trading in the piney mountain air for the oppressive heat of late-summer Missouri. We had too much to begin with in our puny apartment, so after dumping the equivalent of a larger-sized-apartment’s worth of stuff, we still managed to fill a U-Haul and drive it across Kansas and up the driveway of my parents’ homestead in Warrensburg, Missouri. Two days after arrival, Ben headed back to Boulder to keep working while we waited for our visas; I stayed behind with the boys to get things ready for the bigger move. Wrapping my head around another move – an even bigger one – when we had just unpacked our boxes was a chore in and of itself. But two rowdy dogs, six dead guinea hens, two months’ worth of first grade, six weeks of Skype, 44 bushels of apples, and a thousand times hearing, “Turn on the fan!” later, it was time to go, ready or not.

So we got on a plane in Kansas City, boarded another plane in Dallas, got on yet another plane in Los Angeles, and 24 hours after that first step, we stumbled off the plane in a different country, a different continent, a different hemisphere.

The journey has just begun. Stay tuned – we’ve got three years to go.