It’s done. Despite the fact that I haven’t changed my mailing address or gotten a new driver’s license or even found a permanent place to live, it’s time for me to admit that I am once again a full time New Englander.

The family and I are all on the east coast and currently staying at my mother’s house in Glastonbury, Connecticut while we house hunt in the suburbs west of Boston.  We’ve emptied our house in Half Moon Bay and everything we care about is either with us or has been packed by the moving company into storage.  Both of our vehicles have safely arrived on the east coast.

Glastonbury is about 90 minutes from Boston.  Yes, we’re in the house I spent much of my childhood growing up in.  Yes, Keturah and I are sleeping in my old bedroom.  And yes, it feels a little odd to be back.

But it also feels good.  Keturah has a friend who is also moving back to Boston from San Francisco and on one of her recent Facebook status threads was the statement “we came for the lifestyle out west and we’re moving back for the lifestyle back east.”  That pretty much encapsulates how I feel about all this.  I loved living in the SF Bay Area.  But my love for it began to wane as soon as Keturah and I had children.  San Francisco is a great city.  A great city to be a young professional.  But it’s not the most kid-friendly area I’ve ever been to.  One of the reasons we moved back to New England was to live in strong family oriented communities.  I’m not saying those don’t exist in the Bay Area.  They do.  But for whatever reason, they don’t seem like the communities I grew up in.  Those of you who have experienced living in both areas probably know what I mean.

I haven’t spent significant time in Glastonbury since….I don’t know when. The town has exploded. There’s a second middle school. Downtown Glastonbury has tons of new restaurants and cafes. There’s a Whole Foods. The library has tripled in size.

But some things remain. It’s odd what I’m noticing. The car wash on Main Street is still there. I totally forgot about drive up bank tellers. Most of the banks have those.  And it’s still ridiculously confusing to figure out how to get from point A to point B. On day 2, we realized we had to go out and buy a top notch GPS in order to navigate the back roads of New England. ((We got a Garmin Nuvi 1450 LMT))

But in the long run, this won’t be about returning to Glastonbury.  It will be about relocating to metro Boston.  For all the time I previously lived in New England ((23 years)), I’ve never been a resident of Massachusetts.  And I think the longest consecutive string of nights I’ve spent in Boston is probably 4 nights.  So there’s a newness to this adventure that is very exciting to me.  One that I’ll be even more excited to embark upon as soon as we deal with the next thing in the relocation critical path – finding a house to live in. ((Mason starts kindergarten this fall.  So figuring out what town we want to live in is priority #1))