How I Got Here!

It all started in The winter of 2008/09 when my Wife & I decided it was time to move from our rural little snowy town to somewhere warm and sunny. We lived in a little town in Northeastern California, (the forgotten part of California), there the Sierra Nevada's & Cascade Mountain Ranges meet. Our little cabin was at a mile high and we would get snow for six months of the year and summer usually lasted about six weeks!

In March of 2009 we took a ten day trip to San Diego to explore the area, and defrost from the long winter. It was determined on this trip that we were ready for warm weather NOW! In April 2009 my Wife took a trip with two girlfriends to Kailua-Kona, Hawaii for ten days. This is where it gets interesting!

Back in 1984-86 when I as serving in the US Navy I would make port calls at Pearl Harbor, Hi. After the first couple of calls there in Honolulu, I started exploring the other Islands. I stayed on Kauai, Lanai, Maui, and finally on both the Hilo side & Kona side of the Big Island (Hawaii). I fell in love with Kailua-Kona and after my lat trip there in 1986, I have always wanted to live there.

Anyway, back to my wife & her trip to Kona. She was there for ten days and absolutely loved it, actually, she fell in love with Kona too! She returned home to our little forest cabin with a bright idea..."How about we move to Kona?" she asked. We started really looking at the cost of living, where you would live, shop, medical, all the real issues of living. What we found was that it was just about as much cost of living in Kona as it was for our little rural town in the forgotten part of California.

Then we started to look at shedding 20 years of accumulated stuff, because our mountain life would not work on da beach. We had a three bedroom house full of stuff in every room. My father passed away in 2007, her father in 2008, and we had their stuff in our two car garage. It was alot of stuff and it possessed us!

By the middle of June we were going a little crazy because we had an obscure objective to move to Kona, but when? How? We had to make a decision and nail it down.

So, we were going crazy with the obscure goal of moving to Kona. So we sat down and started looking at dates. We came up with April 1, 2010 for our move, purchased two one-way tickets from Oakland to Kona, and then reserved a container to ship our goods, and scheduled our pick-up to be shipped.

Now we had a hard target and began in earnest with the "Give Away — Throw Away" plan to get rid of 20 years of stuff. If you came by to visit during this time, you would have walked away with something. Our friend Dan came over for dinner and won a stereo! Another friend won an entertainment center & flat screen tv, other friend won many other wonderful surprises!

In January 2010 my wife found our condo 100 footsteps from the beach on craigs list! Over the course of the next 46 weeks we removed over two tons of junk to the dump, and gave away everything else. We packed 37 boxes to take with us, (including our Select Comfort Bed), loaded up the u-haul truck on March 28th, 2010 and drove away from our forest house for our new life on da beach!

We stayed in a hotel in Susanville for a couple of nights and spent some wonderful time with our grandchildren before left. On March 30th we arrived in Oakland and delivered our boxes to the shipping company, returned the u-haul and delivered our pick-up to the shipping company.

On April 1, 2010 we departed on our flight from Oakland, CA at 7:10AM PST and arrive in Kailua-Kona, HI at 10:00 AM HST. When we left Oakland is was in the high 50's, when we got to Kona it was in the low 80's, man what a difference!