The plane lifted off. That’s it. Done. Over. No going back now. Life as we have known it will never, ever, be the same. We were oddly, ridiculously good with that. We were calm. My normally racing mind sang, “I’m leaving on a jet plane…” original, right? I’m usually much more clever and much more witty than that, but not then. Maybe we were numb. Maybe that’s it. Maybe, we didn’t have time to process the fact that this was all really happening. Maybe I was tired, too tired to worry that this might not be right. Or maybe, just maybe, moving from Hollywood to Florence, Italy, is the sanest and normal thing we had ever done. Or, we could have been bat-shit nuts. You should know that is always an option. Either way, we were in the air without an address in the USA, without a car, and without full time jobs. We were moving to Italy, to Firenze. And that, my friend, was that.
So, let’s take a step back to what got us on the plane. We were both, separately, in a rut. Bored. Over things. We worked to travel. While, we enjoyed our jobs, we just felt a bit stuck. So, instead of finding a new yoga class, we decided to move to Italy. We sold everything we had at a completely bananas estate sale. (Ie people tried to buy half empty liquor bottles, weird) and we packed up our clothes and headed out.
Our dog at the time, Cash, was coming too. We were nervous about him flying so we wanted to make sure it was as short as possible so we decided to road trip from LA to Atlanta for a flight to Milan, more about the road trip below. He would fly with Lufthansa and go through Frankfort which was said to have the best facilities for animals. He wasn’t allowed to take anything to sleep that wasn’t herbal so I bought every herbal med I could find. He wouldn’t take a thing. I was so worried about him. But, we had to leave him and get on a plane ourselves. The Lufthansa staff was amazing and he kept them company in their offices before the loaded him on the plane.
Ok, so back to the road trip. We went from LA to Sedona, which we love. The problem was Dylan started feeling sick. Turns out he had a terrible throat infection but we got meds at least. Then, from Sedona to Santa Fe. In Santa Fe we went to Meow Wolf which was great. Highly recommend. Then, we headed to our hotel, sorry, no it was a motel. It was HORRIBLE. I didn’t even want Cash to touch the linens. It was bad. Then, we moved on to Oklahoma to see Erin’s family. Then we headed to Memphis, which we loved! And then finally, we arrived in Atlanta for our final night in the US. I walked Cash in Piedmont Park and a rainbow appeared to send us off on our adventure.
Next stop, Milan. We all arrived safe and sound. Cash was exhausted and annoyed but happy to collapse into the hotel sheets having no idea what he was in for.
The adventure had officially begun…
