Honey, this is where we want to live, hike, jog, and be happy. And probably be buried too.

If you follow me, you’ll find some passages repetitive.

I’ve experienced a lot of America, as an immigrant. Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Florida, and California. I lived in all these places. Actually lived. So I experienced them.

California…

I experienced it for the first time briefly when I was doing my MBA on the East Coast. It was in 2005. For the Thanksgiving break, we traveled to San Francisco. We then drove to San Diego. We were a very young family then. Our son was a few months old.

Max is now taller than me. We sometimes go for runs together. We are both excellent runners. He is of course much faster than me but sometimes we run together. This picture was taken on Independence day, 4th of July 2002, in Newport Beach’s Back Bay (California!). We’d just finished our ten-mile run.

We now have four kids, but that’s a different story.

We left Russia in 2013 and never went back. We traveled and moved states in our nine years but spent most of our time in Northern and Southern…