The welcome from the state of Connecticut is a bit blurry at 75mph.
Yes, Matamoras, Pennsylvania. I put a few hours under my wheels just to make the next couple of days’ drive more manageable. I’m in a Hampton Inns hotel just off I-84 here in the northeast corner of the Keystone State. Oh yeah, baby! Matamoras! (It DOES appear on Google Maps.)
The drive was surprisingly easy for the Friday evening of Labor Day weekend. Traffic was very light even in some of the usual nightmare area such as the Mass Pike and Waterbury, Conn. I hope I didn’t use up all my good luck already and will find myself buried in traffic the rest of the way, but I guess we’ll see. I’ll get through Chicagoland tomorrow evening and then it should be smooth sailing for a long ways.
As for where I’m “sailing” to, since many have asked: I am going to be the director of digital media at KGTV, the ABC affiliate in San Diego and part of the Scripps media company. I’m excited for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I’m getting back into the game after a long, hard slog over the past year-plus. More importantly, though, it’s a good opportunity to get back into the digital world at a media company, where content is the core product. That’s where I belong and I’m psyched to play in the frenetic online space once again. Scripps is a good company and I’ve heard great things about the people at KGTV, so I’m looking forward to contributing to the team.
But a short while later, Connecticut gave us drivers a pretty sunset.
The fact that it’s in San Diego is just icing on the cake. Many friends have said that it’s great that I’m going back to a place that I love. Well, I like San Diego…and I like New England and Alaska and Montana and…a whole lot of places. I was getting a little choked up as I was driving out of San Diego in the summer of 2010, and a voice in my head responded, “What the hell?! You’ve been bitching about SoCal since you got here.” And I realized: I’ve loved every place I’ve lived and I’ve hated every place I’ve lived. It’s not the place, dummy, it’s me. I pack my own bags; I’m responsible for how I respond to a given location.
So while I’m sad to be leaving my homeland in New England, I’m happy to be heading back to a place where I have so many friends and there’s so much that fits my lifestyle. And there’s also a job I’m excited about and eager to get to. A couple hundred miles down, a couple thousand more to go.