"You've been saying you wanted to for a while now!"

That was the most common reaction over the past couple months as I spread the news among close friends and family that Corinne and I are picking up and moving across the country. To this day, I have no recollection of being so clear about it over the past however-many years. I remember saying a few times in passing that it would be fun to live somewhere else one day just to see what it's like. But I guess maybe I was the one who didn't really think I would ever do this. I watched some of my closest friends move to destinations as diverse as Spain, Florida, Vermont, and California within just the first couple of years after college. Other close friends more recently left for Colorado and Hawaii. My sister moved to New York, and in 2022 I landed my current job working remotely for Luke Lamp Co. which is based in New York as well. Every time Corinne and I purchased a new piece of furniture for the house, a part of me thought about how difficult it would be to move that piece of furniture long distance. But even amongst all of that, there was still another part of me that "knew" I would never move out of Michigan.

Let's unpack that a little bit. We didn't travel very much while I was growing up. My parents only moved once that I remember - from Lansing to Traverse City when I was three years old. After that, the yearly excursions were predictable. In the summer, we had camping weekend with my dad's extended family plus a couple of visits to the extended-family-owned Lake Michigan cottage (both near Manistee, only a 60-90 minute car ride away from home). Maybe we'd throw in a day trip to Mackinac Island. In the winter, there was driving from Traverse City down to Lansing and Detroit for Christmas with both my mom's and my dad's extended families. Those 3-4 hour drives and one-night stays felt like an eternity back then. We did have a couple of one-offs when I was a bit older, such as two family spring break trips to Florida and two other trips up to the Canadian wilderness north of Sault Ste. Marie. Still though - at the time I graduated high school, the entire world I had been to with any frequency could be drawn as a rough "C" shape on lower Michigan's mitten, extending from Mackinac Island in the north, swooping down through Traverse City and Manistee, and then southeast to Lansing/Ann Arbor/Detroit where all of the extended family was at.

Different places were always interesting to me, though. I used to read atlases for fun and remember reading and re-reading the descriptions of different places (this is the only nerd alert I will ever give you on this blog). Starting around my senior year of college when my friends began moving away, I realized that I could save a lot of money by traveling TO the places they were at and staying with them. Those first couple of trips were eye-opening - learning the norms around flights, rental cars, etc. I vividly remember landing in Spain for the first time in early 2017 and struggling through figuring out my international phone settings in the Madrid airport - all the while thinking about how it was 3-4 AM at home (that was also my first time leaving the US Eastern time zone). I adjusted quickly though and was soon hooked on traveling. Since then, I'm proud to say that I have visited each of my friends and family members in the places named above - at least once, if not 2-3 times (except Hawaii - maybe next year Aaron!).

From there, Corinne and I's shared interests in seeing the US and world played off of each other. Before we knew it, we were going on some of the adventures you may have heard about and seen our photos of. I also started disc golfing a lot and reviewing the courses I played in 2020, as a way to get outdoors and stay socially distanced during the peak of COVID - and that turned into another motivator to travel to different places. Far from only having seen some of Michigan and a little bit of Florida and Ontario, I have now played over 300 different disc golf courses in 21 states plus Iceland (you'll hear a lot more about disc golf in this blog, I'm sure).

But how did my interest in traveling become an interest in relocating? I think it sort of grew naturally. How could I NOT visit a place and wonder what it would be like to live there? I also got a lot of positive input on it from my friends who had relocated. To date, none of them have ever said they regret relocating - even the ones who have since moved back to Michigan. It still took me a while to warm up to it though. I have never been a risk taker, always approaching decisions very methodically (some would say over thinking them). The bigger the decision, the more thought I put into it. But sometimes thinking will only get you so far. In the past, I have thought through some decisions so thoroughly that I forgot to account for how I was FEELING about them until it was too late or until I had wasted a lot of time and effort.

So, I'm not going to try to justify our decision to relocate with logic. But from the day we got the email from our landlord, I knew that relocating FELT right (see Corinne's write-up for an in-depth explanation of how we decided to move in general, and how we chose Seattle). I'm excited about Seattle specifically (the mountains! the culture! the greenery!) but more than anything I'm just excited about the idea of trying something different. For me, it's not really that I feel something is wrong with Michigan - or that something will be right with Seattle. I certainly haven't ruled out moving back to Michigan in three years or 10 years or 20 years. Heck, I haven't even ruled out changing plans THIS YEAR once we're on the road - as of this writing, nothing is booked yet after our swing back through Michigan in July. But for now, doing a 6-month road trip around the US with the plan to end in Seattle very strongly feels right - and I'm going to do it. That's the case even though it's a lot of planning and work. That's the case even though it will be hard to be further away from our family and friends in Michigan.

Thank you for reading this little essay (this is also the only time I'll ever apologize for being long-winded on this blog). I imagine that Corinne will be the main blogger, as I do have to work. When I'm not working, my focus is going to be on enjoying the places we are at with Corinne, sampling the local disc golf, and not trying to jam every possible activity in (this and over planning are both things I have been very guilty of on some of our past normal vacations). My therapist once told me about a mantra of "more being, less doing" and that's how I'm going to try to live - in general, but especially over these next few months. I'll probably chime in here every few weeks or so to share my thoughts on our adventures, and go into more detail than you care about regarding some epic disc golf course I played in the evening or on the weekend.

If you haven't already, please go check out Corinne's blog posts as well which cover more details about how we got to this point. Also, the home page of the blog has links to her reading list as well as our full trip map and my disc golf course reviews (Edit: there is also a form to sign up to get an email each time we write a new post!). I'd like to thank all of my family and friends who have already been more supportive and encouraging than I had any right to expect, as well as my coworkers at Luke Lamp Co. who are a big part of why we're able to do this. If there's something in particular that you'd be interested in me writing about, please send me a text or message and I just might do it! Even if we haven't interacted in a while and just had a class in college or high school or something, feel free to reach out to suggest a topic - or just to say hi. If you made it this far into our blog, I'd love to hear from you. Life is too short to worry about the awkwardness of such things.

Looking to the western sky!

- Dan

One of the first places that I remember capturing my imagination!
Black Beaver Falls, Agawa Canyon, ON, 2010