We’re moving.

It’s a cross country move.

For those who know us well, these words are not surprising. The only surprise may be in how long it took us to do it, but we did the 35 day road trip last year, which staved off a little of the wanderlust.

But not enough.

I’m not sure if it’s because Dave is from New York and I am from Nevada (and raised mostly in Idaho) that the different coasts pull us, or, if it’s as Parker says: we have wanderlust in our DNA. (We’ve been working on family history, and every branch is filled with ancestors who gave up anything to explore a new place).

The last several times we’ve made a cross country move, it’s been to a familiar place. We moved from Boise to Bath, New York – my husband’s home town. We moved from Bath to Reno – my home town. We quickly escaped Reno and returned to Boise, a place we were intimately familiar with. And then we moved (again) from Boise to Bath.

This time is different.

We’re moving to Utah.

We had no specific reason for moving to Utah, other than that’s where my sister and her family live. It doesn’t hurt that the area we’re moving to aligns with our interest in living more peacefully with the earth (they have mass transit, encourage lots of green space, and some of the most beautiful mountains). It doesn’t hurt that they have an unemployment rate less than half of what we have in New York – along with a reciprocal agreement for teacher certification, so that Dave might be able to teach there.

But when it comes right down to it, we’re moving because last summer, when we arrived at my sister’s house to visit during our road trip, our kids and her kids cooked up the plan for us to be neighbors in about 30 seconds of being together again – and never let up in the two weeks we traveled together afterward.

So, we’ve found wonderful caretaker for our home in New York and found an even more wonderful place to live in Utah, where the kids will go to the same schools as their cousin and I will live only 1.8 miles from my sister for the first time in a very long time.

We move in less than two weeks. It might get a little quiet around here as we pack, clean, and load the truck…but I’ll be back in no time.