Our Final Week in California

Our last week in California we wanted to visit with some of our great friends and be sure to hit our favorite spots in San Diego.

On Sunday we went to The Turf Club for dinner. This is where we had our first date back in 2006! It is a cool little trendy steak restaurant where you cook your food on a big grill in the middle of the place. It is a fun place to go and it was great to see where we had our first date.

On Tuesday we hit up Luigi's Pizza in Mission Beach. This is our favorite Tuesday night tradition where you get a giant slice of pizza (It is giant!) for $1.39 and pints of beer for $1.50. They call it tight-wad Tuesdays. We met our great friends Colleen and Beth there. Our friend Colleen Poswers looks just like Colleen Dahlem! And they act just alike, and both Colleen's are going back to school on the east coast to get teaching credentials to become elementary school teachers! Check out the resemblence, here is Colleen and Colleen

and here is Beth and Jim

We will miss both of them very much!

Colleen even got a tank top from Luigis! We then went to the Sand Bar next door after Luigi's closed. We met our good friend Savitri there: Back in 2006 Sand Bar is where we met at the backpacking planning meeting. And watching the Cardinals world series games in 2006 at Luigi's is where we realized we had a crush on each other and prompted Jim to ask Colleen out for our first date.

Wednesday we went to Kabuki Sushi, our favorite sushi place in San Diego. The sushi comes around on boats around the sushi bar so you never have to wait for your food, you just pick it up and eat it!

Thursday we met LJ and Vinnie for game night at LJ's apartment. We will miss LJ a lot too and we are happy she has found such a great guy in Vinnie.

The movers then came to start packing up all of our stuff. We had an obstacle course of boxes in our condo:

Saturday morning met Colleen and Beth for bagels at Einstein Bagels in Hillcrest, our Saturday morning tradition.

After all the stuff was gone Kylie and Millie looked very lonely in our empty condo!

We were now ready for our long trip across the country!

Leaving California, heading east!

As most of you know, Colleen and I are leaving California in just under 2 weeks. We are moving to the east coast, to Raleigh, NC. We've each been here 4.5 to 5 years and we will miss it a lot. We met here and wouldn't be married if we each hadn't moved out here. The weather is fantastic, the dark cold blue waters of the Pacific are beautiful, but it is time to move on and head back east. We tried looking for a long time to get a house here, but the market was crazy and even with prices dropping we couldn't get in the door to a 3 bedroom house in an area with good schools. We knew if were going to move the time would be now, and not 5 or 10 years from now when we might have kids in school.

Jim first interviewed in January with the City of Durham, NC public works department, got an offer but turned it down because the work seemed more like a career step down. He then interviewed with the U.S. Dept of Transportation (US DOT), more specifically within the DOT the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in downtown Raleigh early March. This time the job offer was a good one, and the work seems to be a great progression in his career. He will be in charge of program management of all the federally-funded transportation projects in the western 1/3 of North Carolina. (So there will be some occaional day-trips to the mountains for meetings). He will start work there June 8th. They are paying to relocate us and paying for all of our moving expenses so that was a great bonus that we weren't expecting!

Colleen was accepted to North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh to obtain her Masters in Teaching (MAT) so she can finally be a teacher! She currently is the education director for an environmental non-profit organization here in San Diego and goes to class rooms to teach kids about recycling, watersheds, household hazordous waste, etc. She wants to teach either high school science or elementary school, preferrably 4th or 5th grade.

We are excited to be able to visit the warm ocean waters of the Outer Banks (the ocean water in San Diego is very cold, usually in the 50s or 60s), and the Appalachain mountains, and beautiful fall foliage.

We just secured a rental house in Raleigh, our new address will be:

104 Windel Drive

Raleigh, NC 27609

It's a 2 bed cute brick house:

There is a huge backyard for Kylie to run around! (The dog in the picture was the landlord from when they lived there)

Some additional pictures can be found here:

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/104-Windel-Drive_Raleigh_NC_27609_1104639083

The owners were going to sell the house but decided to rent it out instead. We will have a great big back yard for Kylie to run around. We will also be less than 1 mile from a great area called North Hills with shopping, dining, cafes, bars, etc. After we get settled in for a few months we are going to start looking for our own house most likely in the North Raleigh area or a suburb called Cary.

We both have cousins that live in the Raleigh area and since we have lots of friends and families in New England and St Louis we will be shorter flights away. This summer we have a lot planned:

Jim is the best man in his friend Kevin's wedding. The bachelor party that he planned was a white water rafting trip in West Virginia on the weekend of June 20-21. He will then be a groomsman in his friend Mike's wedding in Washington DC in late July. Then in early August we are going to go for a quick weekend trip to New England for our first anniversary of our wedding on the sea coast of New Hampshire. Then in early October we head to St Louis for Kevin's wedding. Since everything is on the east coast or midwest, living in NC will make travel much easier for all of this compared to if we were still living in San Diego!

Our current plan for traveling across the country will involve us driving with both of us humans, and then our dog Kylie and our cat Millie. For those wondering where we will be, here is our current plan:

-Sunday May 24 we depart San Diego and stop in Flagstaff, AZ for the night.

-On Monday May 25 we will drive from Flagstaff to Albuquerque to visit our friends Lindsay and her husband Aaron. Lindsay is due with their first baby on May 29th +/- so it might be interesting!

-On Tuesday May 26 we are driving from Albuquerque to Oklahoma City.

-On Wednesday May 27th we are driving from Oklahoma City to St Louis where we will stay for a few days to visit family.

-On Thursday May 28th we are going to visit Six Flags, anybody in St Louis feel free to join! Then that night we are going to Jim's younger brother Adam's graduation.

-Friday May 29 we are going to a barbeque at Jim's sister's house for our neice Ashley's birthday!

-Saturday May 30th we are going to our neice Emily's christening.

-Sunday May 31st we are going to drive from St Louis to Nashville and visit sites there, or if we are tired of living out of our car we are going to drive 12 hours straight from St Louis to Raleigh.

We will keep everybody updated as get closer to our move! We hope to do a few more things in San Diego while we are still here, like the Hornblower dinner cruise along the harbor. We'll try and post pictures of that.

Have a great week!