Seattle to Shepherdstown

In January of 2019, I decided that I was done with expensive Seattle and that it was time to move somewhere cheaper. I didn’t know where. I had some friends who were already out in West Virginia, and they offered that area as cheaper but near enough to Washington D.C. if a big city was needed. I flew out to the area to look for a place and get familiar, and on the 24th, I flew back and left from the airport confident that my days in Seattle were through. I would ultimately be wrong about that, but that’s another story. After a year and a half, I ended up back in Seattle anyway and did all that during the pandemic.

It was hard to leave Seattle. I had to leave a bunch of stuff behind. I sent as much as I could to my friends, packed what was left in my car, and set out across the country. It was a hard decision, but I felt that it had to be done to improve my life. Until recently, this has been a theme in my life: make huge sacrifices to somehow get to my own measure of success with what I do. So far, these bargains have never really worked out.

In the 5 years I had lived in the Seattle/Tacoma area, I had met some great friends and had some good times. It was nice to be out of Denver, a place that I thought I would live for the rest of my life, and to experience new people and a new…