I counted the time zones the other day. In the past few weeks, we've been in Pacific, Eastern, Atlantic, Hawaii, and back to Pacific. Five time zones. My calendar looks like it was assembled by someone having a mild breakdown. And yet somehow, everything got done. The meetings happened, the kids got fed, and nobody missed a flight. (We came close in San Juan, but that's a different story.)

It started in Pasadena, our old neighborhood. We lived there for nine years before all of this, and it still feels like coming home in a way that surprises me. We took the kids to Intelligentsia Coffee, Father Nature Lavash Bistro, the South Pasadena Farmers Market. Calvin remembered the climbing tree in our old park. Millie, who was a baby when we left, obviously did not. She just liked the muffins.

The East Coast swing

I had a presentation on Capitol Hill, which meant we were close enough to New York to make it a weekend. Calvin's best friends live there. The boys raced RC cars through Central Park for hours while Carol navigated Midtown with Millie on her hip, which is its own form of extreme sport. New York still feels like a place we could live, which is either a sign of adaptability or a failure to learn from experience.

Back in DC, I took Calvin to a Capitals game. The official justification was "networking." The actual justification was that it was the Caps and the tickets were reasonable. Carol and Millie spent the evening at the Natural History Museum, which Millie has now been to three times and still hasn't seen the dinosaur hall because she refuses to walk past the butterflies.

Chasing warmth

The cold was wearing on everyone. Then Carol found a last-minute cruise deal that was, genuinely, too good to pass up. So we went from Capitol Hill to the Caribbean in about 72 hours, which is the kind of decision-making that used to give me anxiety and now just seems normal.

San Juan, Aruba, St. Kitts, Curaçao. We even ended up in a beach bungalow on Kokomo Beach, which is a real place and not just a Beach Boys song. (I checked. Twice.) Back in San Juan, we accidentally joined a bar full of locals watching the Super Bowl. We're not sports people, but every restaurant had it on. When in Rome.

Hawaii (the work excuse)

After a quick gear swap in Pasadena and a check on Colletta in storage (still there, still waiting, still a little dusty), we flew to Oahu. I do my Army Reserve duty in Hawaii each year. The rest of the family "tags along." Carol's words, not mine. What actually happens is they turn my two-week obligation into a month of beaches, farmers markets, and shave ice research. Steak Shack in Waikiki and Storto's Sandwiches in Haleiwa are now non-negotiable stops.

Millie turned three while we were there. We did Aulani, the Disney resort. I won't tell you what it cost because I'm still processing it, but the look on her face at the character breakfast was worth every dollar. Probably. Ask me again when the credit card statement arrives.

Desert reset

And now we're in the California desert. Julian and Blair Valley, which is the kind of place where you can stand outside at 6am and hear absolutely nothing. No traffic, no Zoom notifications, no three-year-old narrating the world at maximum volume. Just quiet.

Starlink is the only reason I can write this from here. I genuinely don't know how we managed the first couple years on the road without reliable internet in remote spots. Probably with more stress and worse meeting attendance.

The thing about motion

People ask if the pace bothers me. Five time zones in a few weeks, a cruise squeezed between work presentations, a birthday party at a Disney resort, and now camping in a desert with satellite internet. It sounds chaotic, and it is. But there's a rhythm to it that I've come to rely on. The motion isn't random. It's how we've built our life around the things that matter to us: family time, new experiences, and enough quiet in between to actually appreciate them.

We're learning when to push and when to stop. Right now, the desert is telling us to stop. So we're listening. At least until the next flight.