Something about leaving familiarity and pushing myself to learn new things and meet new people has always been a motivating factor for me. From ages 13-22 I was dead set on moving to Salt Lake City. After spending summer after summer and some winters there, I fell in love with Utah and knew I needed to live there eventually.
When I met Harris, I was in my senior year of college, he had just moved from Atlanta to Lubbock and was about 6 months out of his own comfort zone at this point. We were both working at the same golf course (whaddddup Rawls stars!!!) and instantly clicked over our love of the mountains. It all seems pretty magical now, looking back. How our paths ever crossed over the hundreds of miles and state lines, I’ll never know. But not long after meeting, we were inseparable and my dream of moving out of state started looking even more perfect when Harris said he was down for the adventure, too.
About a year after we met, I graduated college and we decided to move in together in Lubbock. We were going to commit a year of working to save up for our big move. At this point though, SLC was fading in our minds and we opened our sights towards different towns and cities with the requirement of being surrounded by mountains, duhhh.
Fast forward to February of 2017 we decided to take a mega-roadtrip through the Rocky Mountains region with intentions of finding our next home. Our BFF Hunter suggested we add Bozeman to our list of places for the trip. He talked about how it's a place seriously unlike anywhere else, and with his experience of growing up out here through summers and winters, we had to take his word and run with it. In my mind, it was the furthest north I would ever be and holy shit, what is in Montana? Curiosity hit us hard and we added it to our route.
Despite the fact that we only spent about about 48 hours in Bozeman, something about it felt like we needed to give it a shot and move here.
After the funnest and most memorable send off by our friends and families, we moved to Bozeman in August 2017. We had maybe (and luckily) three months rent saved up, one of us employed (Harris), and so many freaking emotions. The five of us were so far out of our comfort zones. I remember finally leaving our driveway in Texas. We packed every possible item we could, left behind things we didn’t want to, and said goodbye to a life we knew too well. Harris drove the Uhaul with Ozzie and Lucy inside, and I drove Harris’s Tacoma with Marley as my copilot. We split the trip into two days. Two full days of driving and thinking. Driving and thinking. I remember thinking, what if this is a mistake? What if we fail? It was all so scary because I wasn’t just talking about leaving, the reality was that all of my belongings were packed up and I was leaving.
But lucky for us because we had been through that whole thought process before and prepared for this day as much as we could lol. We knew how scary it would be, but we knew the risk of not taking this particular risk, and that in itself made it worth it for us.
When we finally got to Bozeman - roughly 35 hours later, we were welcomed with the most open hands by Hunter and his family. If you’re lucky enough to know this fam, you would expect nothing less. It was a great start to a very scary and exciting venture. Harris started work a day after we moved into our apartment. The next week, Harris’s parents flew in to help us get settled in to our new place and helped me get a job!! They turned what would’ve been an otherwise stressful transition, into something fun and exciting for us. They are a one in a million type of people. So helpful and hardworking with some hardcore unconditional love<3.
Anyway, here we are, months in to this adventure we craved so badly we actually had to go for it. Some days are easier than others, and i’d be lying if this wasn’t the most intense growing lesson, but I’m easily reminded why all of it is worth it.