After spending the last ten years or so in Texas, I finally left. In January my family and I moved back to Oregon after having been away for a long, long time. So far things have been pretty good. One of the biggest reasosn we wanted to come back was to be close to the coast. It’s just a little over an hour from our house to the ocean. We’ve been out there a few times already. It’ll be even nicer once it actually warms up so we’re not dealing with cloudy, drizzly weather.
Being here is defintely very differnt, though, and in many ways. The biggest change is probably the size. The Dallas/Ft. Worth area has something like 3.5 million people. The entire state of Oregon has about 7 million. Where we are is maybe 300k or so. Obviously, this means that there just isn’t as much to do or going on here. On the plus side, I don’t actually do much so it’s not a huge problem. I kid, I kid, but it’s really not too bad. The biggest thing for me is the lack of massive commercialsm. In Dallas we had at least three of anything within a few minutes of your house. Here, though, there’s just one or two of something in the whole town.
I’ve not been able to sample a lot of the local stuff yet, but am slowly working on it. Of the few places thy I’ve been so far, it has certainly been interesting. While a lot of these types of places were in Dallas too, they weren’t really places I went. So far I’ve not found anything that is a lit like my old haunts, but I still have a lot of looking to do.
The other big thing here is the difference in the street culture. Dallas’s mayor all but had homeless people killed, whereas here there are at least three in every corner. I’ve not been hit up for money everywhere I go since New Mexico, so that’s some fun re-adjusting too. On the plus side, they have mostly all been polite, which is more than I can say for the New Haven homeless.
While there are a lot of aspects about Dallas that I really miss (despite hating Texas), I’m generally happy about the move. I do really miss my friends, though. I’m excited about what sort of new stuff I’ll get myself into up here. I’ll attempt to post updates, but can’t make any promises.