Good-bye Vermont, hello Arizona

We just spent 8 days riding 3200 miles on our BMW R1200GS from Vermont to Arizona.

Most people think we're nuts, but we love the adventure of leaving a place we've called home for 22 years and moving to Prescott, AZ where we've spent less than 2 weeks in the past 2 months.

Why would we leave friends, jobs, and a familiar environment for something completely new and different, where the only two people we know are our real estate agents and finding the grocery store requires a GPS?

Why not?

When we first married 32 years ago we lived in Augsburg, Germany where I was in the Army and Mike worked for Sony in the PX system. We traveled often, learned a new language, and lived in a small German town where we were the only Americans. Back in the United States we settled in northwest Indiana where I grew up, building a house on my grandparents' farm. Almost as soon as we finished a new addition to the house we decided to move to Vermont. I can't believe no one tried to stop us:  we planned to open a new business, we couldn't sell our Indiana house and bought a house in Vermont, and we had two young children ages 18 months and 2 weeks.

As the boys entered high school we started thinking about the next chapter in our lives and decided to move to a new location. Mike researched places to live based on economics, weather, outdoor activities, thriving community, close to a major airport. Over the next 5 years we traveled to Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Colorado and Utah looking for the perfect location.  The economy crashed at the same time that we settled on Colorado and put our house on the market. Two years later we crossed Colorado off our list due to hydraulic fracturing, the economy improved, we felt our house would sell and we needed a place to live.

We heard about Prescott, Arizona, spent four days in the town, and loved everything. One month later we had a contract on our house in Vermont and we spent another five days looking for and purchasing a house in Arizona. 3 weeks after that we were on our motorcycle headed West.

Moving into a new community isn't easy, and that's the point. We want to shake up our lives, challenge ourselves with new work and new activities, learn about a different part of the country, and find new roads to explore on our motorcycle.

The next chapter in our life begins.