The Beginning

This is a story not many of our Colorado friends know. Almost eight years ago, Chris and I came to Fort Collins on a rainy August weekend. It was one of those random cool summer weekends, not one of Colorado’s marquis “300 days of sunshine.” We flew using Airtran tickets I had won in a raffle, and stayed with a family friend who we had never met. In that weekend, we decided we would carry through with our plans to move to Fort Collins. Jeff, our gracious host, showed us around town (lunch at Avogadro’s Number and of course a stop at the New Belgium brewery) and helped us find a duplex to rent. Then Chris and I took our rental car up the Poudre River for a short hike.

“This is where we can be the people we were meant to be.”

I don’t remember if one of us actually said those words, but that was the sentiment of the weekend. The deal was sealed when we drove back to the airport. It was very early, and the sun was beginning to rise over the plains to our left as we headed down I-25. To our right, the moon was just ducking behind the mountains, which were slowly being illuminated by the sun. It was a magical scene – a typical glorious Colorado morning.

Two weeks later, we packed everything we owned into our cars (plus 8-linear feet we rented in a semi truck). Tiger came along too, to make sure the next 3 days were anything but quiet. We were leaving Georgia just after Hurricane Ivan made landfall, and hoping to get through Alabama and Mississippi before the storms hit. It was Labor Day, 2004. We had been married less than a year, and were ready to create a new and exciting life together. It took 2-1/2 days to get to Colorado. Tiger kept me entertained, after I learned that he was much happier choosing his own fate than locked in his carrier. Sometimes he ended up walking across my lap as I drove, but mostly dozed in the open carrier or on the floor in the backseat. We tried to let him walk around and go to the bathroom at a rest stop in Alabama (with some makeshift leash tied around his neck), but he was pissed to say the least, and I don’t think he peed once the whole trip. Chris was driving his little red truck with a small U-Haul attached to his truck (the bed of which was full with our 4 bikes).

Not many people know that we came to Colorado with no jobs and just a month-to-month lease, in case things didn’t work out. (Although Chris had some job prospects and I planned to apply for grad school once we established residency.) Within 3 weeks of being here, we climbed a fourteener (Harvard) and did a 16 mile “circumnavigation of Mount Wuh.” Chris found a job in his field, doing video production at Media Tech. I helped pay the bills with a housekeeping job at a nursing home (!). Then I got a job at Peleton Cycles – which helped escalate my interest in cycling into a full-fledged addiction J. We started going to a church that advertised free Wednesday night dinners (First Presbyterian), and met other young couples in a Bible study group (Matt and Beth were two of our first Colorado friends). Our Bible study started meeting at the Bean Cycle right after it opened. Eight months after our arrival, I found out I was accepted into the atmospheric science graduate program at CSU. We ended our month-to-month lease and bought a house. I guess the rest is history.

From the beginning we’ve lived in Fort Collins because it feels like it is where we should be, and not because of a job or school. So now the idea of leaving for a job feels kind of wrong, in some ways. When we were deciding where to move, one of the con’s for Fort Collins was that moving to Colorado seemed cliché. But whatever, it worked and became our home. Our lifestyle, our friends, the opportunities we’ve had (work, school, mission trips) – it is so intertwined with where we live. Heck, we even started a family in Colorado, something we never dreamed would happen (we figured we’d only stay a few years). Now Fort Collins feels like home, and it will be hard to leave. I’m writing this as I fly to Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, to consider a post-doc position there. Who knows what will happen next. I hope we can approach the next stage of our lives with the same excitement we had when we packed the cars up and headed west 7-1/2 years ago.