Moving to LaGrange???

Image © 2016 Nancy Laube

After over 20 years in Silicon Valley, my wife Nancy and I are relocating to a small town about 90 miles south of Atlanta.  We arrived in Los Altos Hills in 1991, at the dawn of the Internet, and were lucky enough to be a part of the most amazing technology revolution over the past 25 years. These years have been well beyond anything we could have imagined when we arrived here from New York.

Over the years, Nancy had often reminisced about her childhood in the mid-west and how being close to her family was so wonderful.  She talked about having coffee with her aunts, and extended family dinners with cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents.  So one day when she was remembering such a moment, I said "why don't we just move near your sister in Georgia and be part of our  nieces' lives?"

From that moment, we started to consider if we could actually leave our friends, favorite restaurants and our lives here in Silicon Valley.  Turns out there are restaurants and good food everywhere, so that left us thinking about friends.

After 20 years, we have established a group of wonderful, interesting, exciting friends.  Could we leave them?  We first realized that some of them were leaving us.  Over the years, some of our best friends had moved on.  Some moved away and then moved back.  But we realized that we were able to maintain our friendships despite the distance.  Facebook, Twitter, Skype etc. allowed us to be part of their lives and they of ours, maintaining our connections between our visits and phone calls.

We also realized that our lives were so busy that we only physically visited with most of our friends every 6-8 weeks.  Nancy made the sly comment that we could move to Georgia and never even tell anyone!  If someone invited us to dinner (which usually was a few weeks out given our schedules) we could just fly back and see them, with no one being any the wiser.

Our decision made, we rented a house in LaGrange about 3 miles from my wife's sister, and in the first 10 days of staying there, we had 4 family dinners, had our nieces come by after school to do homework 3 times, and visited WalMart 9 times (but that is a story for another day).