Let's back up.

I regret not actively writing about the last few months, because I think it was probably one of the defining moments in my life. About four months ago, we packed our car with as many bags as it could hold, loaded the kids and the dog and started driving. 10 days later, we made it to Portland. Of course, there's a lot more to it than that. Looking back on it, we never even realized that we wanted to be west coast people until 2009, when we went to California for a friend's wedding. We went back the following year for a great vacation, but left with the realization that we were basically priced out of California, and after some cursory Googling kind of assumed we were priced out of the whole west coast. We knew we had to get out of Florida, but our destination was unknown at that point. We wanted seasons but not a lot of snow, better schools, better jobs, lower crime, different politics. Lily was born and we knew we would need to figure something out soon, because we didn't want her to grow up in Florida.

We started looking at North Carolina. It kind of met our requirements but after a couple of visits, we were unimpressed. It was still part of the south, it was still really hot in the summer, it didn't give us the feeling that we got from California, the politics sucked. I got pregnant with Amelia and we still didn't know what to do...but decided to expand the search again, because if we were really going to do this - really leave our home and jobs and friends and family, we needed to go to the right place. We didn't want to settle for something mediocre some place semi-close to Florida just because it was easier to move there. I came across a cost of living calculator online one day in 2012 and started doing comparisons between different cities. I was very surprised to find out that we came out significantly ahead in the Portland area. We were shocked, really, because we thought we couldn't afford Portland, or any place cool in the west. We did massive amounts research online - message boards, Google Street View, real estate sites, HGTV, Food Network, Youtube, and yes, we watched Portlandia. We calculated how much it would cost to actually move. Since the move would be so expensive, we decided to not spend a few thousand on a visit to check things out, and just move to Oregon sight unseen. On paper, it looked like it would be perfect for our family.