The Trip

Welcome to our blog!  The purpose of the blog is to document a cross-country road trip by myself and my cousin TJ starting in Hesperia, California and ending in La Plata, Maryland -- a distance of some 2584 miles.  Why are we making this trip?  It all started back in the Fall of 2009. <insert harp glissando here>  Due to the disastrous state of the California budget, my wife HHJ kept having school librarian positions eliminated under her feet.  Not wanting to give up on her dream of being a school librarian, she got a tip from a friend about a school librarian position for the Charles County School District in Southern Maryland.  She applied, and they were interested, but after careful consideration we decided we were not ready to make the commitment of moving back east.  But soon after things went from bad to worse with HHJ's "regular" classroom position.  A difficult group of students and lack of support from her administration led to extreme unhappiness for HHJ.  Then HHJ learned that Charles County had yet to hire someone for the position she had interviewed for, and that they were still interested in her.  At that time we realized the only way that she could do what she wanted to do was to leave the state.  She flew back to Maryland for an in-person interview and was soon offered the position.  With not a little trepidation and terror we decided to make the move.  After all, we had lived in Stockton for almost 18 years at that point, and had sunk deep roots and made many close friends.  The future was exciting, but leaving our past, and our friends, was very scary.

One of the concerns was that I was only a little over a year away from the age of 50 -- the magic age at which one is able to retire from the CalPERS system.  More importantly, if I resigned my library position I would lose my retiree medical benefits and a payout for my unused sick leave.  Not wanting to lose these benefits over what seemed like a relatively short period of time, we made the difficult decision to do what so many military families have had to do:  live apart for about 13 months until I turned 50 and was able to retire from the City of Stockton.

So on August 1st, 2010, HHJ and our son T-Ray boarded a plane to begin a new life in Maryland.  I stayed behind to wallow in self-pity and rampant alcoholism, later selling the rights to my story which was eventually turned into the Oscar-winning film Leaving Las Vegas starring Nicholas Cage as myself.  OK, the part about the self-pity and the alcoholism and the movie didn't happen.  But I did hang out a lot with Nicolas Cage.  OK, that's not true either.

But the part about the plane was true.  The past 13 months have been quite a roller-coaster ride that saw HHJ and T-Ray set up a new life on the east coast, while I immersed myself in library politics, more than my share of take-out food, lots of Netflix movies that I knew HHJ would not want to see, baseball, packing up and selling our Stockton house, and trips to Hesperia and Disneyland.  (Two places often confused with each other.)  All the while we managed to plan trips to reunite as a family every six weeks or so.  Friends generously opened their home up to me and the past three months have been spent as a homeless gypsy counting down to my 50th birthday.

As the time of my retirement got nearer, it was time to decide how I was going to make my final move to Maryland.  After discovering that shipping our car back was more expensive than I had anticipated, I decided to drive.  I've never driven cross-country before, and the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of having an adventure.  But doing all the driving by myself might quickly turn an adventure into drudgery.  The solution was to invite my cousin TJ (my best man and the brother I never had) to go along with me.  Much to my delight he accepted the offer, and the 2011 U.S. Tour was officially in the planning stages.

So yesterday was my 50th birthday.  And my last day at work.  13 long months that saw us sell and buy a house and uproot our lives on one coast only to replant them on another are almost over.  I leave Stockton on Sunday morning for Hesperia where I will visit my dad and pick up TJ.  Then on Monday morning we ride into the unknown of Interstate 40.  I hope you come along for the ride.