It’s funny how life can creep up on you. This past week has been exceptional in both opening my eyes to new possibilities and simultaneously irritating the hell out of me.

I’ll try to restrain my ranting, but I admit my blood pressure spiked more then once over the past 10 days.

Why? It started with a business trip. Something I always find stressful. I know some folks love to travel, but I simply am not one of them. Add to that the anxiety caused by mechanical problems with the airplane for my scheduled flight, followed by the chaos of running across SeaTac airport to find out that the next flight I was put on was overbooked … and I’m already off to a great start.

I’ll leave out the details about my poor hotel experience, customer service fails and the 12 hour days I put in for work. I’m sure you’ve all experienced it yourself.

Instead, I rather would like to focus on the discoveries I made. You see, my trip was to Austin, Texas. A place I have recently been seriously considering moving to. If you’ve followed this blog at all, you know that that I love to garden, cook and tend my chickens. In essence, I’m a home-body content with spending my days digging in the dirt and rambling off the Latin names of native species (no, seriously, I’m that neurotic).

So after a long week of work it was a welcome respite to spend the weekend in Austin with my husband. But being us, we didn’t just play. There was work to be done! We spent time driving out to the outlaying towns that surrounded Austin, hoping to find the next place we might call home. During our travels we met some amazing people and instantly made a few new friends. The kindness of the people we met was truly un-nerving. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, or have ever visited, you know what I mean when I say we in general are a special group of over-caffeinated, passive aggressive, politically-correct obsessed humans. Note, I said we before you fellow Pacific-Northwesterners get irritated with me. I’m certainly guilty of this behavior too!

We circled Austin in a giant radius around the city and saw the scruffy hill-country, toured the cornfields north of Texas (and ran away quickly – that’s not the farming I’m interested in) and wound our way down South-East of Austin to the unique Loblolly pines (if it’s a pine or fir tree, I want to see it). But it wasn’t until we drove through the East area of Austin, near Lexington and Elgin that we finally found what we were looking for: groves of oak opened up to reveal lush meadows. Ponds dotted the landscape while creeks meandered aimlessly through it all. The soil was loamy and rich. The air smelled sweet and even the few cows we saw looked satisfied as they languished in shallow pools and munched on fresh grass under the shade of a tree. Now this showed some possibility.

So now, when I lay in bed thinking about what I want to be doing next and where I want to be, my mind wanders off to the swaying grass and tall oaks. I don’t know if this is just a passing dream, but at least it offers new possibilities.