must get out of this hotel room...

So I've been caught in my schedule at work and the weekends are my only time to unwind. I've been caught up in March Madness, but I can't be in my hotel room any more. So what am I doing to see more of NoVA??? 

Geocaching. For those that don't know, this is basically a scavenger hunt using GPS coordinates. You can go to Geocacher and search by location to find a cache near you.

All of the caches I've found so far have been in parks, so I've trodden over many bike/running trails around here. So here's a quick intro to my morning. I park nearby and walk to the first set of coordinates. It's really loud from all the birds chirping and the water running. 

I figure out how to view my current lat/long (I'm using a Garmin Nuvi 350) and find the first cache under some rocks.

Success!!!! Now I'm official. I take a golf ball as a memento. I'm going to put it into the next cache I find and cross-polinate the caches like an bumblebee.

I'm psyched now. I move on to the next cache. On my way over I hear a woodpecker going crazy and I can see evidence of his previous work. I find the next location no problem, all I have to do is stick my hand in this dark log.

Now on to the final cache of the day. I thought for sure it was hidden in here

But I was wrong, I found this nearby. I don't think the chipmunks left it.

My new friend today ....

Week One and life to go

So I finished my first week at work. Not a whole lot to say about that. I've found a dry cleaner, BBQ place, and gas station close enough so I should be able to survive.  Monster energy drinks are consistently $0.50 cheaper in Virginia. That's a pay raise right there!! 

I spent the weekend house-hunting and ended up finding a 3 bedroom townhouse in Reston, VA. It's been recently renovated and it's at the end of the community, so there's plenty of green space for the kids to wear themselves out. I'm happy that's off of my list of things to do, but this is the second weekend in a row I've focused on moving. I need to get a weekend where I actually relax. I did watch Pitt in the Big East championships this weekend, but when they beat Georgetown I figured that wasn't the best time to go meet new people. 

The family and I have been keeping in touch with AIM and iChat. Our friends were nice enough to buy us USB video cameras, so there is a camera for the kids, one for my wife, and one built into my laptop. So I can tell my daughter to do her homework in realtime. Hurray!!!!

Getting Settled

I made the trip alive although I imprinted a nice ass groove on the driver's seat. I've made it through the first few days at work getting acquainted with the team and learning the basics, (Parking, traffic, coffee, desk). The place I'm staying at is a dive of a hotel. It's a corporate ghetto. The place is overrun with sugar ants, and you can't blame me because I'm not cooking. This is just motivating me to find a place to have the family move up.



I've been mapping out schools I think are acceptable for my kids, and so tonight I'm going to drive the areas to

1. See what the areas are like at night.


2. Find an unadvertised cheap rental in a great school district (hopefully).


3. Get out of my cage before the ants regroup and attack.


4. Get better acquainted with the area.

Bags packed and ready to go

So here's the lowdown on traveling light. I've got

1. One bag of cold weather gear (sweaters, jackets and so on)


2. One bag of casual clothing


3. One suitcase of work clothes


4. Two briefcases with important paperwork


5. One backpack with assorted computer gear

So 6 bags to last me 4 months. It didn't take too long to pack the car and everything fits in the trunk. When I was originally planning, I was looking at taking art and kitchen stuff to make my apartment feel more like home. My wife kept me right on track by telling me

"You will eat off of paper plates and miss us so you focus on moving us up there."

She's right, it helps to have someone keep you focused on the prize.

The back story

I'm a nerd living in West Palm Beach. I was contacted by a recruiter for a consulting job in Washington D.C. This is a company that I've always wanted to work at (because of my Strategic Management professor). I wasn't offered the position I was expecting, but I think that is going to help me grow in the long-term. Bonus!!!!

My wife and I talked about this at length. South Florida is a tough environment to raise kids because it is so transient. We were looking at North Carolina like everyone else, but this is how things worked out. She said she would stay in Florida to sell the house. That's the current plan.

This has been a hard decision for me. I'm leaving a great job, wonderful friends, my wife and family behind to "restart" our life somewhere else. Maybe our house will sell quickly and we'll all be together. I hope it does. It's just an additional stress on top of moving to a new city and starting a new job. I just wanted to share this time in my life so I can look back and laugh about how far we all came.