The Road Not Taken

It is a year ago to the day that I left my job in the USA. It seems like only yesterday. A lot has happened since then apart from earning any money of course.

Looking back I wonder what I did with my time after I left…

I think the first few weeks were spent considering my options and enjoying the break from work. I arranged a day to move out of my apartment and into my friend Lauras house. I sold a lot of my belongings before moving out such as all my gym equipment, my dining table and chairs, my surround sound system and other pieces of furniture.

When it came to move I had the help of my friend Sean (who is now serving another tour in Iraq). He has a nice pimped out van and it only took 4 trips with what I had left to move it all out. The scary part was having the king mattress on the roof of his van. It was strapped on and we had our arms out holding it while we drove along. Going over a bridge over I25 a huge gust of wind lifted the mattress and I thought we were going to take off! The whole ride with that mattress seemed to take hours and I lost a few minutes of my life that day and gained a few grey hairs.

Then came the 2 yards sales at Lauras house. The first one co-incided with the day England were playing France in the European Championships. We had my sofa in her driveway and one of my tv’s in the garage so we could watch the game and then jumped up to help the punters as they arrived.

Yard sale punters are like sharks. They get to your house hours before the advertised start time to pick over the goods. I got one guy who was a big fat priest in a black robe with a huge beard and a massive silver cross hanging from his neck. He had his two kids with him who spoke English better than he did. This bugger pissed me off for two reasons. Every item he picked up he would offer me $1 for it, even if it was marked $25 or more. Then he would ask “…for the internet…” if it looked vaguely electronic. France had just equalised with England and this bugger was saying “why so expensive” when he picked stuff up. I tell you I was so close to killing this guy you can not believe it. Then he saw my car with a for sale sign on it and said “…yours….?”…I had to say yes so we wandered over and he asked how much. I said “$9000″..he said “…one thousand…”, I said no “$9000!!”. He eventually left before I murdered him in the street.

I eventually sold my car to some folks from out of state and then I could happily plan for my return trip to the UK.

From then on it was a case of just enjoying the Colorado summer. I knew I was going to leave around August so I just had some fun over the summer, visiting friends and going to concerts and bars and restaurants.

I returned to England on 27 August 2004. I was going to look for contract work and perhaps work for six months as I had planned on going to NZ for 3 months but did not want to go at the height of summer when it may be too busy.

After a few weeks I decided to carpe diem and book a ticket to NZ.

The rest of the story begins at the start of this blog. I detailed the events leading up to my trip and obviously during the trip and subsequently after I returned once more to the shores of England.

So there it is. A year in a few paragraphs. A summary for sure as a lot has happened. The only thing left is to see what is around the corner and embrace it.

Tags: Post-Trip

This entry was posted on Friday, May 13th, 2005 at 11:33 am and is filed under Post-Trip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.