Goodbye, Virginia (Part I)

If someone would have told me back in the fall of 2006 when I moved to Washington, DC that I would stay there for almost nine years, I would have laughed in their face. Yet it happened just that way. Three years ago today I passed the FSOA, and yesterday I moved away.

In the days leading up to my move, I was incredibly busy. After my packout I was still working full-time, attending meetings at the State Department every day. I reaped the rewards of having completed many administrative tasks and personal errands in the months and weeks prior, ending up with a little more time for fun. And most importantly, very few instances of being angry and frustrated that I had more things to do than allotted time to do them.

On the evening of Thursday, May 14 my husband and I threw a fun going-away happy hour downtown at Teddy & The Bully Bar. In my typical fashion, I sent out an invitation over five weeks in advance. LOL. Over the course of nearly nine years in this area, I have had the opportunity to meet dozens of fantastic friends and colleagues and I was so pleased that many of them were able to make it. I will truly, truly miss the professionalism, support, humor, innovation and intelligence of the people I’ve known here, and I hope that our paths will cross many more times in the future.

There were more than one hundred wonderful pictures from that night, many of which I haven’t even seen yet. Here are just a few…

I was pretty stunned when my matron of honor and her husband walked through the door of the bar. I hadn’t even invited them because they live hundreds of miles away. I only invited people who lived within 20 miles of DC because it was a weeknight and just a casual stop-by-for-a-drink kind of thing. But here they were standing in front of me – absolutely amazing. So we took them to a late dinner at the fabulous Founding Farmers and went for a final little drive in my car because…

…early on the following morning, Friday, May 15 my beloved VW was picked up and taken away to be shipped to Uzbekistan.

I went out to the parking lot over an hour early to remove the license plates and do a final sweep for personal items in the vehicle, when low and behold the truck showed up early. This is why it pays to do things early, kids. Bonus – an extra hour (albeit a carless hour) to myself.

Goodbye Hildegaard! Be good!

It was strangely sad to watch her leave. And it was incredibly aggravating to navigate northern Virginia over the next few days with a full schedule by using only public transportation. Whenever I started to get irritated, or apply another band-aid to my foot, or anxiously check my watch for the tenth time worrying that I would be late, I reminded myself: soon you will be a stranger in a strange land, where everything is in Russian or Uzbek. After that, I settled down into a state of gratitude.