#2 Do you spend a lot of time traveling to and from places? If so, is it worth it?

I’ve gotta say, we have it pretty good commute-wise where we are now. For me, work is 10 miles and an easy 15 minutes away. The campus where I work has a variety of places to eat, a nice state-of-the-art gym, and even a post office. So once I get there, I really don’t need to leave if I don’t want to.

My husband’s commute is a little longer—30 minutes in each direction. But he works at the Base, which is its own little self-contained city. Restaurants, banks, a post office, a gym, a dry cleaners, and even a BX where you can buy almost everything you can dream up are easily accessible.

Having come to Georgia from Southern California, the easy commuting and light traffic here is a delightful treat. In California, we had moved out to Riverside County in order to buy a nice, new house at a reasonable price and to get our girls in better schools. The tradeoff was facing a long, ugly commute to our jobs in the Los Angeles area. This meant traveling on the 91 Freeway, which we unaffectionately nicknamed “The Beast.”

I wangled a deal with my employer in Redondo Beach where I’d work for three days per week and the company would put me up in a hotel for the two nights I spent in the city. So I just drove one round trip into Los Angeles County each week. Rich, on the other hand, worked at Northrop Aircraft at that time and had to make the long commute on The Beast every day. It was an hour’s drive when the traffic was light in the early mornings, but it often turned into a 2 to 2-1/2 hour nightmare of start-and-stop, bumper-to-bumper traffic in the late afternoons. He’d frequently arrive home exhausted and frustrated. How he did that for several years, I’ll never know.

We have to chuckle now when we find ourselves complaining about the 30-minute drive to North Macon to get to the new mall and the movie theater. We quickly remind each other how much better this is compared to days of yore!