By the final week of June, there wasn't much left to decide.
The schools had been sold almost a year earlier.
The house was sold.
Most of our belongings were packed or gone.
We had visited the girls and grandchildren, helped Sharon move, and made most of the arrangements for what came next.
On June 22, we were waiting for the movers.
A week later, we would leave Irvine without another home waiting for us.
Emptying the House
The final days were mostly practical.
Movers.
Boxes.
Storage.
Cleaning.
Deciding what came with us, what went into storage and what we simply didn't need anymore.
Rooms that had been part of our everyday lives slowly emptied.
We'd spent years filling this house.
Now we were dismantling it in a matter of days.
And then, on June 26, Shirley made a pumpkin pie.
Not because we were having a celebration.
She made it because there was a pie shell and the ingredients were still in the freezer.
The smell filled the house.
I wrote:
"It smells incredible and makes me think of all the Thanksgiving meals we've had here. I'm sure we can make pumpkin pie elsewhere, but…"
I didn't finish the thought.
I probably didn't need to.
The Last Night
On June 28, we said goodbye to neighbors and friends.
Then Shirley and I sat on the patio and opened champagne.
It was our last night in the house.
Thirty-four years earlier, we'd begun building a life together.
We'd built a family.
We'd built schools.
We'd built a home.
We'd built financial security and a future that our younger selves could only have imagined.
And now, for the first time in a very long time, there wasn't something else we needed to build.
I had written something for Shirley that evening:
"Tonight, for the first time in a very long time, we've finished building."
I wrote about the thousands of ordinary days that had brought us here and toasted what might come next: curiosity, experiences, health, conversations, unforgettable places—and continuing to find our way back to each other.
I ended with:
"May we never stop being surprised by the world—or by ourselves."
Then we finished our champagne.
June 29
The next morning began with a notification from the airline.
Our flight had been canceled.
Of course it had.
We'd been scheduled to fly from Los Angeles through Amsterdam and Paris to Marrakesh. Instead, we'd been rerouted directly to Paris, with what looked like an uncomfortably short connection onward to Morocco.
There was nothing we could do about it.
And there were still things to finish.
We moved the last of our belongings into storage.
Then we put the Audi into storage too.
That may have been the moment when the transition became most tangible.
No house.
No car with us.
Everything we owned was either in our luggage or sitting somewhere waiting for a future version of us to decide what to do with it.
The anxiety had been high.
But eventually there was nothing more to prepare.
I wrote:
"The house is as clean as it will be. We packed what we packed. And we're off."
We closed the door and left.
Not Quite Gone
We didn't actually leave California that day.
We spent the night at a hotel near LAX.
The following morning, June 30, we went to the airport.
Check-in was easy. Security was easy.
Then we walked into the Air France lounge.
We'd been there before.
The last time, before leaving for Barcelona and Africa, the experience had amazed us.
This time I noticed something slightly unsettling.
It already felt more normal.
I wrote:
"Last time we were here, we were amazed. Today it feels more normal, even though it's not."
We ate lunch in the lounge and waited for our flight.
Then we boarded.
What We'll Remember
We'll remember watching the house slowly empty.
We'll remember the movers and boxes and the strange experience of reducing a home to things that would either travel with us, go into storage or disappear from our lives.
We'll remember Shirley making pumpkin pie because the ingredients happened to be left in the freezer—and the smell bringing back years of Thanksgiving dinners.
We'll remember saying goodbye to neighbors and friends.
We'll remember drinking champagne on the patio on our last night.
We'll remember putting the Audi into storage.
We'll remember the anxiety of that final morning, when there was still cleaning and packing and moving to finish and the airline decided to cancel our flight.
And we'll remember finally reaching the point where there was nothing left to fix:
The house is as clean as it will be. We packed what we packed. And we're off.
Where Were We Going?
Morocco.
But that wasn't really the important question.
For almost our entire adult lives, travel had meant leaving home and eventually coming back to it.
This time there was no house waiting for us.
Our belongings were in storage.
The Audi was in storage.
We had reservations and an itinerary that would carry us through Morocco, Portugal, England, an eclipse cruise, Greenland and Iceland.
After that, we'd eventually return to the United States.
But not to Irvine.
On the evening of June 30, we flew east.
The next morning we would land in Marrakesh.
And for the first time in our lives, we weren't really traveling from home.
We were simply traveling.