In May of 2013 June and I took a 3 day motorcycle trip to Yosemite.  This trip changed our lives…for the better.

Now, I have lived in California all my life except in the year 2000 when I lived in Washington State.  California is a beautiful state having almost everything nature has to offer; sandy beaches, rocky beaches, low deserts, high deserts, stunning forests and high mountains.

Lot’s of pretty scenery for sure.  Problem though, if you live in San Diego, it takes many hours of crap to get to these wonderful places.

When I moved to San Diego in 1992, there was little traffic and the people were fantastic.  Fast forward 20 years and traffic is horrible (I called it LA Jr.) and the people are not nearly as friendly.  If you have read ‘Noah’s Perfect World’, you know I don’t deal well with people or rude drivers.

Come May 2013, we decided to take a quick 3 day trip to Yosemite.  We would head out Interstate 15 to Hwy 395 and go to Lee Vining.  Heading out of San Diego there was nothing but super-slab and traffic as is typical.  I don’t really mind a little traffic, but 3 hours is a bit much.  It took us over 4 hours to start seeing some pretty scenery.

Once out of the Southern California congestion, we had a fantastic time.  We spent the night in Lee Vining and headed up to Yosemite the next morning.

Once down in the park, there was so much traffic it just wasn’t enjoyable.  Sure, the scenery was spectacular, but there were so many cars and people…rude people to be exact, that it kind of ruined it for me.

Outside the park, the scenery is fantastic!  Everywhere you look is just jaw-dropping beautiful.

We had another nice relaxing night and headed home the next morning.

For the first few hours, we were nice and relaxed and enjoying ourselves.  Then, the traffic and people hit.  By the time we got home, all the stress that was released during our trip had returned.

We sat in the garage drinking a nice refreshing beer and talking about our trip.

We decided there has to be a better way of life.

A few months later, I got a promotion at work.  My new job allowed me to work from home.  June asked her boss if she could work from home and surprisingly, he said “yes”!

Our better way of life had just been handed to us.

We were so lucky to have this opportunity and did not want to waste it.  We could live anywhere we wanted.  We discussed several places to live, Washington State, Utah or Colorado.  After some back and forth (I kind of wanted Washington), we decide to check out Colorado.  June had lived in Colorado twice previously and was quite persuasive.

Within 2 weeks, we were on the road to Colorado to find a new place to call home.

When we got to Colorado, we spent the night in Evergreen and decided to start our home search there.  We just walked into a real estate office and said we wanted to look at houses. Our realtor, Lynn, showed us quite a few houses for the next two days, but we didn’t find one that called out to us.

We headed back home, but knew we found the right area to live in.  Evergreen is a nice place with a cool old downtown area.  The town next to Evergreen is Conifer.  Conifer had a better vibe for us and we decided we would focus our search there when we came back.

The next month, we came back.  After seeing a few other houses that didn’t call out to us, we found it!  The house that we wanted to make our home!

We walked in the front door, looked out the wall of windows and saw this:

 

The next words out of my mouth were “Sold!”

We made an offer on the house and after some back and forth, it was ours.

In January of 2014, we packed all our stuff and headed east…east to our new home…east to fantastic motorcycling right out our door…east to our better way of life…

Thanks for coming along