One of the big lessons we learned from traveling around the world is that we finally comprehend the magnitude of its size. Maps do not do any justice to the scale of how small we are and how little we know or can know about this planet, its cultures and people. It is just bigger than us!
The US is a big country and everyone knows that but when we had the chance to drive from its southern pacific coast to the middle of Texas our perceptions changed very fast. The extensiveness and beauty of this land is quite something to see and it is only by seeing it that perceptions can be changed. We drove from the sunny pacific coast through mountains made of massive and small solid yellow boulders, to colorful snow topped mountains that protect immense cactus endemic to the Sonora desert (Saguaro National Park), to sandy white dunes that suddenly appeared in the middle of nowhere (White Sands National Monument), to green fields planted with all kinds of produce to feed 300+ million people, to deserted areas where the border wall with Mexico can be seen in the distance. We guess it is the modern version of the Chinese wall; the ironic thing is that Mexican’s are not our enemies but our allies. Interesting. We should remember that at some point all that land was part of Mexico. Another big lesson from this trip is the perception of time and history. Sometimes we forget that 100 years is probably the equivalent to 24 hours in the life of the planet and therefore also in the history of the cultures that populate this planet. The roots of current issues can go so far back that no one even remembers them. These are the kind of things we thought about as we drove across the expense of the Southwest.
As soon as we got to Texas we drove to El Paso to cross the border into Mexico with the purpose of buying some medicine in Ciudad Juarez. Crossing the border was not a happy or exciting experience. Ciudad Juarez is not a pretty place and unfortunately it has become the ground floor of a drug cartel war for control of the territory. We purchased the medicine and we drove back into the US as fast as we could. We continued our trip for two more days into the heart of Texas. The scenery changed from rolling hills to big mountains to flat deserted areas. The common denominator was the lack of people, hundreds of miles of land and no one around. We decided to drive only during the day, not that it is dangerous or anything, but if something had happened with the car we would have been stuck in the middle of nowhere. Not even our phones worked in that part of Texas.
We were welcomed to Austin by our friends Louis and Susie Cloete. They moved down from Boston a few years ago. At this point Austin was the only place other than San Diego for our new home. We wondered, could we live in TX? There are so many rumors about the people there. In the northeast there are certain preconceptions about Texans and having never been to Texas before we didn’t know much else about this place. It took us four days to make up our minds about staying in Austin. We compaired both San Diego and Austin based on 14 different factors that matter to us and the winner was Austin. We love the quirkiness of the city and its people. We also love the family oriented environment that we perceived in all public areas and, last but not least, we love the weather and the access to the Colorado River crossing the city.
With the decision made we found and apartment and booked a flight to Boston to organize our affairs. We gave ourselves 10 days to get our stuff organized. Taxes, storage units, friends, family etc… We really had to rush it at the end because the snow arrived and shut everything down (possibly forever). Bostonians are never going to forget the 2014 winter. It is almost impossible to comprehend the amount of snow that has fallen in the Greater Boston area in just under 3 weeks.
From Boston we drove south passing through Stamford, Jersey City, Newark, Philadelphia, Washington DC, the Blue Hills, Virginia, Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis, McKinney and Austin. We made it in one piece with a flat tire and down IPad (which is missing at this point) but otherwise unscathed. We are very happy to be in Austin. We got a nice apartment south of the city in a central area. We are now waiting for the containers carrying out belonging to show up here. It seems like the snow in the Boston area also affected the expected delivery date but barring any catastrophes they should arrive in the next few days.
Today we enjoyed the 70 degree weather by the pool while working on the various things we need sort out to fully establish our new life in Austin.
One Step Forward RTW 