Trip To Indiana

Last week, we took a trip out to Columbus, Indiana to visit family. My husband and I are both from Pennsylvania (I’m from Lancaster, and my husband’s from the Poconos, where we live now), but before moving to our current house, we lived out in Indiana for two years. My husband’s degree is in Elementary Education, and after several years of not being able to find a full time teaching job down in Lancaster, where we were living at the time, we decided to take a leap and move out to Indiana, where he was offered a third grade teaching job at a great school. 

We had talked about moving out of state or to a different part of a country for a couple years leading up to that move. We both love Lancaster, and knew we wanted to end up there to raise our family, but thought we should get away and experience another area before doing that. We toyed around with the ideas of Oregon (ultimately too far away), Colorado (also too far, and not close enough to an ocean for me), New Hampshire, North Carolina, and others. 

Never in my life did I think we’d end up living in the midwest.

But that’s where we found ourselves, and we fell in love with it. Matt’s cousin, her husband, and their three kids live in Columbus, and are the reason we moved to that town. We absolutely loved living closer to them, seeing the kids grow up and spending a ton of time with them, and the hardest part about moving back to PA was definitely leaving them. But there were other things we loved about the town, too - we both had wonderful jobs and loved our coworkers, we found a great church and a became a part of a supportive small group, we joined various intramural sports leagues and made friends there, and the little town itself was great. We were close to Indianapolis and Louisville, KY, and had the opportunities to explore a whole new part of the country. It was great.

Last spring, when Matt applied for his current job, back in PA, it was an unexpected opportunity that we never dreamed he’d actually be able to do. We both grew up going to camp here, it’s where we met back in high school, and we both spent three (me) to four (him) summers during college on summer staff. This place holds a big part of our hearts. Matt’s always fantasized about working here full time, and now it looked like he actually would have the opportunity. It didn’t take a whole lot of debating - we were in. As much as we loved our home and our community in Indiana, we missed our friends and family from back in Pennsylvania. We made the nine hour drive back to Lancaster many times in the two years we lived there, and it was getting a little old. So we jumped at the opportunity, and in June of 2015, we sold our house, packed everything up, and headed back east after some tearful goodbyes.

This past week was the first time we were able to go back to Indiana together to visit (I actually flew in last August for a few days after we had taken a trip down south, but Matt had been unable to get the additional days off work). It was so nice to exit the interstate and drive the familiar roads back to Columbus. We stayed with family, visited co-workers, caught up with friends, went to our old church, took a walk around downtown, drove through our old neighborhood, and of course stalked our old home.

Side note: Aside from leaving Matt’s family, I’d say leaving this house was the hardest part about leaving Columbus. Is that weird? I loved this house. LOVED it. If I could have picked it up and moved it with us back to PA, I would have. Perfect layout, nicely updated to our tastes, cute little yard. It was just perfect.

Life may not have worked out how I planned. I’ll probably never get the chance to live in Oregon or New Hampshire, but that’s okay. I never in my life thought I’d call Indiana home, but for two brief years, we did. And it was a great experience. We will be forever grateful for the connections and the friendships we made there, and we’re so grateful to still have family in the area to give us an excuse to get back out there and visit. 

Until next time, Indiana.

Love,

Steph