Welcome to the Canyon Journals!  These pages are meant as a way to document a very special undertaking upon which my wife and I are about to embark.  In just a month, we'll be leaving Keene in order to head out west and spend a year living at the Grand Canyon, working for Xanterra, the company that runs the hotels and restaurants and gift shops there, and living at the Canyon's trailer park in the motor home that we just bought, just a quarter-mile or so from the South Rim.

Why are we doing such a thing?  Mostly because we can, I suppose.  Terry's youngest has just graduated from high school and will soon be married, so the house we live in is far too big for us now.  We have choices to make, and neither of us wants to make our decisions based on what will be the safest and easiest for us.  We have an opportunity actually to live at one of the great wonders of the world, to get to know the Canyon at a level that most people can only dream of.  We have a chance to simplify our lives greatly, living in a very small space (by American standards) with relatively few of the things that we take for granted in our home.  Our motor home is very nice, but its two-room set-up is a far cry from the two-story (and basement) home in which we now live.

Is this a huge risk for us?  Well, yes and no.  We already have jobs lined up, so we're not risking the chance of not having work and income.  On the other hand, we're both leaving jobs that we've been at for over six years.  We're leaving behind the comfort of knowing our jobs quite well, of living in a familiar setting among people we've lived near for the last eight years.  We'll both be making significantly less money than we do now, although with the lack of a mortgage, property taxes, etc., our disposable income will be very similar to what it is now.  I think it's a bigger risk for my wife, who never has lived outside of New England.  My father was in the military, though, so moving has been second nature to me my whole life long.

I came upon a passage just this morning while I was reading These Things I Wish for You (Reflections from a Father's Heart) by Christopher Kimball.  It's a book of letters to his children, and in his letter to Charlie, age 4, he says,

Yes, we're taking a risk, but when we think of afterwards, of our lives once we've finished our time at the Canyon, we'll have a very special year to look back on, rather than another year in the comfort and security of the home that we've built up over the last eight years.  We have to consider possibly the most important question of all:  Is life full of possibility and potential, or is it full of limitations and impossibilities?  Personally, I know the answer to that question, for me in my life right now.

So now you know about our plans.  We'll leave New Hampshire on September 5, heading west.  We're going to take our time, visiting Niagara Falls, the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Teton National Park, and my parents in Colorado before ending up at the Canyon.  We'll start our jobs on October 3.  I don't know how often I'll add to this page before we actually leave, but you can check back from time to time if you'd like.  I'll try to add to it at least once a week.  This isn't going to be a "we did this and then we did that" journal.  My goal is to make this a document of reflection and learning and growth.  I want to learn from this year--from the Canyon, from the people we'll meet and get to know, from the job, from the animals--and as a teacher, I always want to pass on what I learn to others.  If I try really hard, perhaps I'll be able to do so.

Today is a fitting day for the next entry, as it's Jess' wedding day.  In just a few hours, she'll have a new last name and be starting out on a different life for her, full of new and different experiences.  For Terry and me, that won't happen for a couple of weeks, but that's still pretty soon.

Our house still hasn't sold, but that isn't as much of a worry as one might expect.  It will sell.  We may not sell it for as much as we'd like to, but it will sell.  And that will pretty much be the final piece to fall into place as we make the huge change in our lives.  And of course, our move isn't dependent upon the house selling--we'll be leaving on September 5 whether it sells or not.  We have a good real estate agent whom we trust, and we're not concerned about leaving it in her hands.

We've already gotten rid of most of our furniture.  It's fascinating to watch the house empty out.  We won't miss it at all--we like our couch and our desks and all that, but now it's time to move on to something else, and those things can't be a part of the something else.  That's okay.  You see, if we become attached to the furniture, if we just can't bear to part with it, then it stops functioning as a means to an end and become a bunch of anchors, keeping us in place, keeping us chained to a bunch of things that really aren't anything more than material goods.  We could put all of it in storage here, but then we're tied to the furniture financially, and it will end up costing us much more than it did originally.  It will also limit us greatly when we decide to start over, somewhere else--we'd need to do so close to the furniture, or else move it a great distance, which also makes little financial sense.

We've had pretty good foresight in this area--or perhaps our simple tastes and our ability and willingness to be easily satisfied have helped us out a lot.  We've always bought furniture that we like a lot, but that isn't expensive or irreplaceable.  We have no collector's pieces, nothing that we simply can't part with.  We will put our dining room table and chairs in storage, and we have a coffee table that we'll save because it's unique, but that's only because we have to have a storage shed for the few "irreplaceable" items that we do have.

The hardest part for me is getting rid of books--I've been giving boxes of them to the library for years, but I still have many more than I thought I did.  I'm holding on to most of them because I bought them originally for what they can add to the website, but they sure do get heavy when I put them all together in boxes. . . .

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