It was for a lot of reasons. After Mark took a new job at Seesaw in April that’s fully remote, we got to thinking about whether Seattle was the best place to raise Zelda. The frequent rain makes it a real indoor town; with under-fives still not eligible for covid vaccination, it had stayed for us an at-home town. With Seesaw HQ in San Francisco, Yana’s sister and nephews in Napa, and the Stanford alumni network radiating out from Palo Alto, the sunnier, foggier, but most importantly drier Bay Area was calling!
Our plan was to first get down there and AirBnB while househunting. Yana arranged for a POD to be delivered in June and reserved an eight-foot UHaul trailer for the Fourth of July weekend. But watching listings on Redfin turned serious in May when we fell for a great place in southwest Berkeley. It had been deviously underpriced — a practice we’d soon see was common for the Bay. We placed a distant eighth place among two dozen offers, ultimately losing to twice the list price in cash. Yes, we’d been warned the market down here is nuts!
Farewell Emerald City! 
Zelda’s first and last concert in Seattle, at ZooTunes! 
Mark finally rode around Lake Washington again like he’d threatened to do for years. 
This time with a computerized odometer!
Despite that loss, we decided to keep momentum with a serious search from Seattle. Mark had already flown down for the open house for that Berkeley heartbreaker and saw eight other homes that day too. But we finally became victorious — after literally rolling up all our spare change — with a bungalow in Albany. An “urban village by the bay”, Wikipedia has it that the tiny city of Ocean View was partitioned from Berkeley in 1908 after local women protested at gunpoint the dumping of Berkeley garbage there. The next year it was renamed after the New York capital in honor of the hometown of its first mayor in order to distinguish it from the Berkeley neighborhood of the same name. Today, Albany boasts great schools and parks, a quaint downtown shopping and restaurant strip, and Brewsala Love Nest 3!
Zelda helped pack in Seesaw swag! 
But she actually mostly unpacked.
So we had a house earlier than planned but wanted to stick to the Independence Day road trip. We moved some things on craigslist, held a garage sale, and packed most everything else into the pod. One snag: UHaul called us with about 36 hours to go to tell us our trailer was missing. So much for the great Seattle immigration: it turns out everyone’s moving south! Our option now (if we wanted it) was a six hour round trip to pick one up in Chelan. We briefly explored going with a 12-foot trailer, but it was a double axle that Trinity wasn’t rated to tow. Miraculously, a different agent claimed to find us an eight-footer in Bellevue, but it too turned up missing Friday morning.
After a few more calls, our best hope now was a four-foot trailer confirmed to exist just south of Olympia. Mark’s good friend James was kind enough to ride along to beat the morning I-5 traffic in the hover lane. Sweating how much cargo we’d have to jettison with the significantly smaller four-foot trailer, Mark asked conversationally in the UHaul office whether they happened to have a five-footer. Astoundingly, one had come in just that morning! Maybe there’s room for disruption in the one-way rental industry. Now several hours behind schedule, we had just enough room for everything in the trailer and completed our planned three-day drive without any more surprises.
No room to spare! And this was before we managed to get the house plants safely in… 
At last, we’re ready to leave town! 
One regret: we didn’t supervise the POD packers too closely.
Now we’re putting the finishing touches on BLN 3 to make it our own and settling into life in Albany. The community here seems strong: there was a great concert in the park one sunny Saturday and last month we made it out to the largest annual outdoor street festival in the East Bay. Even closer to home, we met a lot of our neighbors at the annual block party a few weekends ago and signed up to shut off the block again next summer. The weather is a little more nuanced than we were expecting, but we’ve definitely reached an outdoor town!
