Welcome to my author’s website. I’m going to use this blog to give more details of my projects, tell you who I am and answer questions about my books and book writing.
I currently have a full-time job as a software engineer. I have a blog that I write posts off and on, depending on the time I have available (blog.frankdecaire.com). If you notice that my average posts per year have gone down, that’s because my wife and I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah in June of 2019. To get an idea of where we have spent our time, I have another blog for my hiking (hiking.frankdecaire.com). We specifically moved here to hike these trails.
Adventures in Moving To Utah
I’m going to go off the rails here and talk about the fun we had moving to Utah. My wife and I lived in Germantown Maryland. We decided to take a vacation out West back in 2016. My wife, Michelle, was a full-time student at the time, but she was out of classes for the summer and she spent a lot of her spare time researching places to visit. We were already avid hikers by then and she researched a lot of national parks and that’s about the time she discovered BLM (Bureau of Land Management). We had a lit a mile-long of all the places we might see. It was a great plan. Make a list of places longer than we could possibly visit. Then hit the places that we are in the mood to visit when we get there. We got a hotel in Cortez Colorado, which was 9 miles from Mesa Verde. We visited that park twice and hike a few trails there. We visited Valley of the Gods, Natural Bridges, the Grand Canyon (South Rim), Arches, and Canyonlands (Island in the Sky).
When we visited these sites, we saw trails we wanted to hike but didn’t have time. So we have this running bucket-list and we decided that someday, we would come back.
A year later, we took another vacation in the summer. This time we decided to visit sites to the West of our previous visit. We booked a room in a resort in Vegas (The Venetian). Vegas was a great place to stay, but it’s not our scene. However, Las Vegas is a great central area to visit national parks in the region. We visited Death Valley, Red Rock Canyon, Hoover Dam, Lake Meade National Recreation Area, Valley of Fire State Park, Zion National Park, and Bryce Canyon National Park.
As you can guess, our bucket list grew. We have parks and hiking trails for this region of the U.S. that we still haven’t seen. After returning from our second vacation in the West, we decided that we needed to move here if we wanted to do something about this bucket list of ours.
We had to wait until Michelle graduated, otherwise, out of state tuition would sink us and a move to another college for her senior year would be difficult. We also needed time to pay off our credit card debt and save some money to move.
Looking for a job in another state on the other side of the country was impossible. I indicated on my cover letters that I was willing to pay my own expenses and that we were familiar with the logistics of moving between states (we lived in Michigan until 2013 when we moved to Maryland). Eventually, we were at a crossroads of “maybe this is never going to happen.” That’s when we pulled out a spreadsheet and titled it “Utah or Bust.” We listed ideas off the top of our heads and then we organized them from “doable” to “ludicrous.” We started working down the list and tried different strategies before settling in on the “save up 6-months of income, quit our jobs and move.”
By the time we settled on the final plan, Michelle was already working her first job out of college (her first software development job). We were able to save up money quickly, but the timing was everything. Our lease was coming up in June, our credit cards were all paid off and we had almost six months of living expenses saved up. We decided to go for broke. Michelle quit her job a month early so she could get everything lined up: movers, townhouse cleaning, etc. We got an estimate on moving and it was around 10k to move all the stuff that we had. That’s when we decided to look around and get rid of anything that we could re-purchase cheaper in Utah after we move. We got rid of our ratty furniture, everything in the closets that we haven’t touched in the past five years. The exercise equipment was a no-brainer. Germantown had a free metal pick-up service. Put it in your driveway, call them and they come and get it. We got rid of the Bowflex (that we bought used for $75) and many furniture items that were metal (shelves). We donated the treadmill. That was free. Purpleheart collected a lot of clothes, games, books and other items. We had a Purpleheart collection once a week. The dump was free for our county. We took several pickup loads there. It was high-stress, but we pared down our load to a point where it only cost us around 3k to move everything.
The next step was to quit my job and then we would be on our way. We were scheduled to drive to Utah starting on a Monday and I turned in my resignation on Friday before. I received a call from my boss who told me that he would appreciate if I didn’t say anything about the resignation letter and that I could work full-time remote. It’s nice to be needed! I agreed. This was a stroke of good luck because now we have lots of money in the bank that we don’t have to worry about using as living expenses.
We had to hire a service to transport our car. We drove with the truck because we needed to transport our cats. We were torn between flying and transporting both vehicles and just driving one vehicle. The thought of selling the truck and flying also crossed our minds. In the end, we drove the truck across the country on a four-day trip. We visited the vet one last time and she recommended some drugs that we could use to knock them out if we needed it. We bought the drugs, just in case. Good thing we did, because the first night we drove about 40 miles from Germantown to Frederick where we were planning to stay before starting our trip. Victoria was freaking out like she was about to have a heart attack. Poor cat. After that, we gave Victoria and Samantha the drugs and they slept for eight hours at a time. That was about all the driving time we could take per day.
On day three, we were half-way across Kansas on I-70 when we received a text message to call the company that was transporting our car. We had to find a spot that had cell phone access and exit the freeway to call them. The told us that they were at our apartment and they needed someone to sign for the car and pay their fee. Oh boy! That’s when we found out that the moving company contracted them and they wanted to collect independently. I guess they thought we were going to get into a transporter and get to Utah in the next few minutes and pay them. We called the company that contacted them and finally twisted their arm to take a credit card payment. They emailed a receipt back. Then the transport people called us back and told us that they needed someone to sign and wanted us to pay them separately. We called the apartment office and told them our situation and they agreed to sign for the car and park it in our rented garage. Sometimes things work out.
It was difficult, but we made it and “Utah or Bust” got us to Utah. If you look at all the hiking and sight-seeing we’ve done since June of 2019 (see hiking.frankdecaire.com), you can tell we’ve enjoyed our new home.
Oh, and that bucket list… it’s still growing!