15+ months.
Never in my life have I had so much lead-time on a move.
If you’re studying abroad in college, you might know a few months ahead of time.
When you take a new job in TV news, you’re lucky if you have a few weeks to pack things up and find a new place to live.
Chris and I found out about this move in June 2015 (just about 2 months before our wedding day). We were on the east coast for a wedding and knew that news about our future home was being released that day. Would we start our lives together in Japan, Hawaii, Florida or California? It was exciting, and we had grand plans of sitting down in a cute DC restaurant, logging onto the website and once we knew where we’d be moving, toasting the upcoming adventure with a margarita or a nice glass of wine.
Things don’t always happen as you plan…
Turns out, we were grabbing a couple of waters from a street vendor near the Capitol when Chris got a text message from one of his buddies congratulating him on Japan. Chris showed me the text and I replied, ‘Sayonara USA!’
Of course, there are people and things we will miss. We’ve done our best to spend time with family and visit as many friends as possible. We’ll miss college football Saturdays and Mexican food (that list may grow…)
At the same time, we are so excited! In the past 15 months we’ve done our best to ATTEMPT to learn Japanese, rolled our own sushi a few times and have read everything about the country we can get our hands on. We’ve been talking about moving to Japan for so long, I can’t believe the day is finally here.
So, we’ve checked our TEN bags (I swear, half of them are Chris’) and are at LAX waiting for our 12 hour flight to Tokyo…
Sayonara!
