Bye-bye Portland

Well, I'm launching the blog from our hotel room in Seattle tonight, the first night of our relocation out east. We're planning on taking 90 across, and our driver said it's safest to go up to Seattle then over. We had anticipated getting to Spokane today -- we didn't anticipate spending nearly 3 hours finishing up at the house, packing the Lex, then spending another 2 hours in traffic just trying to LEAVE Portland! We think it was the City in denial that we were actually leaving. :-)

Since this is the first post I should do some background material. First, we are moving to New Jersey because SignaCert, my employer, gave us the opportunity to move out east and allow me to support New York City and surrounding areas full time instead of flying back every few weeks. I'm a sales engineer, and support both pre and post sales, as well as coordinate the implementation of our technology. Since nearly all of our customers are large financial services companies (investment banks and hedge funds), all of my work will be out of Manhattan, and some surrounding areas: Jersey and Connecticut also.

So we found a great place in Hoboken, NJ, which is an extremely quaint community just across the Hudson from Manhattan, and has a gorgeous view of the NYC skyline. I'll post pictures when we get there. We chose Hoboken for a few reasons: one, EVERYONE in NY recommended it as an up-and-coming community in which lots energy and money have been dumped in to. And it's true -- the place is awesome. Also, it's very convenient for me to get into the City from there. And third, we could have a car there, which was important for us because of the touring around New England and the East Coast that we want to do while we're out here.

We are on a 1 - 2 year commitment to live out here, at the end of which we'll book back to Portland and pick up where we left off. While it certainly wasn't easy leaving friends, and being close to family, and our favorite town Portland, we do feel like this is an awesome opportunity to live in a part of the nation that we never would ordinarily live. Likewise, SignaCert has been extremely supportive of making this work.

I opened by saying that this was the first night. It's now 11:14pm and we are waking up at 5am to get on the road, so I'm going to wrap up. I will update more tomorrow.