One year ago today we loaded up a borrowed truck for the last time and in the great tradition of The Grapes of Wrath and The Beverly Hillbillies, rolled on out towards a dream of a better life. The Joads struggled along Route 66 from Oklahoma’s dustbowl through California’s Mojave Desert to get to the Promised Land. Jed Clampett sold his oil-rich swamp in the Ozarks for 25 million and moved his family to the hills of Beverly.
Our move wasn’t as difficult as the Joads' and certainly not as well subsidized as the Clampett’s. It took us 10 years to have the wherewithal to make the two and a half hour drive from our house in Seattle to our new home in Canada. Though we woke up in A New Country … we didn’t have the time to appreciate it for the first three months or so.
First we had to deal with schools that were going to start in a couple of weeks. Our son was going into the 6th grade and my wife was going to the University for her graduate degree. And we literally had an accumulated lifetime of boxes to unpack. All the nuts and bolts that held together our day-to-day lives had to be figured out and fast. Where are the schools? Where are the stores? Where do we get the car fixed? Where’s the library? Where’s everything? For the first time in my atheist life I welcomed guidance from above.
We had our cheap but trusty Tom Tom GPS to tell us how to get to where we wanted to go.
One of the first things most of the people we know back in the states asked us is a variation of this question: What have we found up here that we don’t like? It’s interesting to note they wanted to know the negatives first. And after a year of Canadian living behind me I have a ready answer.
Pizza.