Our Key-Less Life

As many of you have heard, Katie and I decided to not continue our time in Honduras.  This is due to a variety of reasons, primarily concerns of safety.  If you want more information on that, here are some articles:

http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/statistics/Homicide/Globa_study_on_homicide_2011_web.pdf

http://www.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=769249&publicationSubCategoryId=200

So there we were, at my parent’s house in Pacific Grove with no jobs, no apartment, no car payments, nothing tying us down…for those of you who know us, the choice was pretty obvious.  We simply followed the famous advice of Horace Greeley when he said, “Go [North] young [married couples], go [North] and grow up with the country”.  It is the new Manifest Destiny (without the ethnocentricity, justification for war, or destruction of multiple people groups); vast opportunity lies before us as we follow in the footsteps of Dorothy to the Emerald City.  

So we packed up everything we owned into a 14 foot U-Haul and on February 16^th, 2012 we began a trip of nearly 1,000 miles on a route we had taken before (2006: Travis and Grant’s epic trip to visit Andrew at SPU, record time 13 hours and 15 minutes; 2010: Smith Brothers and Katie’s trip for Stone Wedding/Christmas, 16 hours).  First thing upon arrival we stuffed everything into a small storage unit, received a set of keys, and began our 10^th week in a row of living out of a suitcase (we are now approaching our 12^th as I write this…how many weeks until we qualify as “nomads” on our taxes?).  My brother and his wife graciously accepted us into their home and our life in Seattle began. 

            I have described our current life to people before using a small and extremely common object: keys.  We don’t have any.  Scratch that, we have one, to a lock on a 10’ by 11’ storage locker with 99% of our worldly possessions in it.  No car keys, no apartment keys, no work keys, no bike lock keys; our life is nearly key-less.  Not sure what this means exactly…right now it feels like complete dependence on others, very little cash flow coming in, uncertainty in every area of life, and a seemingly endless job search...in the future we will probably remember it as a simpler age, romanticized by Father Time.  Realizing this, Katie revealed to me that she actually had the ability to time travel, so we went to the future, wished we were in the past again, and went back, appreciating our newfound simple and romantic life.

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