New Mexico was an unexpected assignment. It wasn’t a place that crossed my mind as one I’d ever live in but it was home for nearly four years. Brian & I tried to make the best of our time there. Although Covid caused a kink in those adventures we weren’t expecting to leave the southwest anytime soon so we weren’t in any hurry to get back out there.

Just as unexpectedly as the world going into lockdown, I found out I was pregnant. Rost was a couple of weeks old and it was one of those all hands on deck at three a.m. with a crying infant kind of nights. Brian & I had just gotten our little nugget to fall asleep and we were trying to catch a few moments alone with each other before we both passed back out ourselves. We knew we didn’t want to raise our child in New Mexico but it was in that moment of exhaustion that Brian asked if I wanted to pick up and move back home to Montana. The sentence wasn’t even fully out of his lips before I quietly yelled YES! Thankfully, my excitement did not wake Rost back up. Over the next few days, we worked out what would need to happen in order for us to move home: my job would need to agree to my working remotely full time, and Brian would need to find a new job since he was tied to Albuquerque, we would need to work out housing in Montana amidst a housing crisis in Montana, sell our home in Albuquerque, and so the list went on. We figured all this would take roughly six months to a year to work out. It didn’t matter, we weren’t in a hurry. However, the actual timeline took less than two months to complete and before we knew it we were packing up our lives in the southwest and returning home to Northwestern Montana.

If you’re wondering, Bucket is still the queen of long road trips.