Two Years in the Lowcountry!

It's been two years since we moved to South Carolina.

Two years! That's hard to believe. It's gone so fast. I find time does that anyway; the older I get, the faster it moves. In any case, that we have passed our two-year anniversary in our new home in the Lowcountry is hard to grasp, and yet I still find everything here very fresh and new.

It's easy for things to become mundane. A drive back and forth to a favorite locale or the food at a frequented restaurant. Even a place as cool as the city of Savannah, while no means mundane, certainly is much more familiar, and our drive there is no more an event than a drive from downtown Mooresville to the Circle in Indianapolis. That much, however, is still hard for me to wrap my mind around: that I can just up and drive to Savannah, GA, anytime I want to. Pretty cool.

It feels like home, it really does, and yet still feels new. Two years, and we've become very familiar with our surroundings. Still, we have conscious thoughts while we're out that this is a new place, and we still learn little twists and turns every time we go out. As we travel about, we occupy our brains with the idea that we need to remember this turn, learn this road, put a pin in this spot. We make a conscious decision to familiarize ourselves with what we see and do, and it occurs to me that I never did that in Indiana.

When you grow up in a place, you don't go out into your surroundings with the idea that you have to learn your way around. You just go. In the days before GPS, you relied on other's directions on how to get to that place or this place, but otherwise, you just went, traveling each day about your daily life without much thought that you need to familiarize yourself with your surroundings. Without any effort, everything becomes second nature. I'm reminded of the drive east on State Road 144, between State Road 67 in Mooresville and State Road 37 in Waverly. I could make that drive today, in the dark, with the headlights out and my eyes closed. There's not a road down here I could say that about yet. And still, I never recall thinking as I made that drive, "I need to remember this route."

Born and raised in Mooresville, IN, I spent the first 47 years of my life there. There's not much I don't know about the place I used to call home. Heck, there's not much about central Indiana I couldn't tell you about, and I could work my way around the entire state without much trouble.

I would bet that it's gonna take a lot longer than two years to get to that point here in South Carolina. To be honest, we haven't ventured too fair out of our general area here, aside from having done quite a bit of exploring in Savannah. Other than traveling through back and forth to Indiana, I've never been in our state capitol. I've been to Charleston once. I've never been to Greenville. I've never been to Myrtle Beach (which is where most people in Indiana think I moved to. It's not. MB is three hours away from me.)

None of which is to say I don't want to visit and explore those places. It's just a realization that after two years, I haven't begun to scratch the surface of our new hometown, which is why so much of it still feels new, even as I become familiar with where we live. Will it take 47 years to become as familiar with my new home as I am with my former home? Hard to say.

But I know this: There isn't one thing about our move I've regretted. Living here in the Lowcountry has been everything I'd hoped it would be, and more, and with all due respect to Mooresville, IN, I wish I'd made the move years ago.

If only for the change in weather and climate, the move would have been worth it. Ginger is indeed so much better here, but there really is nothing like wearing shorts and taking a golf cart ride on days that in Indiana, we would have been frozen to the couch. True, hurricane season can get a little hairy down here, but I'm still on the fence as to whether or not its more stressful than dodging the thunderstorms, tornados, and snowmageddons in Indiana. Otherwise, it almost couldn't be more perfect.

And I now live in the house of my dreams. Well, at least the house of my dreams I could afford! I have much to be thankful for in my new home. Until now, I'd never in my life lived in a home that had more than one bathroom -- In. My. Life. As such, I'd never had a master bedroom that had its own bathroom. I've never had a garage, and, ergo, a garage door opener. I've never had an office that didn't have to double as something else. I've never had a kitchen big enough to hold the number of people who needed to be in it at any given time, and that had more cabinet space than stuff to put in the cabinets. Most of all, I've never had a home big enough to have friends and family come visit and stay with us. And that's what's made this place so great. We think it's a beautiful home.

But there's a dynamic to the culture here that's so different from what I grew up with. We live in a vacation spot, and that comes with its ups and downs. Mostly ups, in my opinion, but still with its challenges. The restaurant food here, for example, is overpriced. Not because it's so much better, but simply because it can be, because we're a tourist town. The seafood here is excellent, I hear, because I'm not a seafood fan. Otherwise, there's fine places to eat, but nothing inherent that warrants the food being 15-20% pricier than it is anywhere else. Beyond that, the cost of living is about the same as it was in Indiana, as surprising as that may be to hear.

But it's something else. Most people who live here aren't originally from here. Most of our population is like me... they came here on vacation and fell in love with the place and decided to move here. And because of that, everyone who lives here is happy!

First, there's no "us against them" mentality with the tourists, mostly because we were all once tourists. But even the locals understand the tourists not only provide for most of their career livelihoods, but they are the reason their town has become such a cool place. Sure, there are some locals who lament their small-town past, but most have embraced the growth. I spoke with a local just the other day who told me, "yeah, this place used to be pretty boring before all the tourists starting moving in."

Second, everyone is here because they want to be. They're here for happy reasons. Nobody get's forced to move to Hilton Head, SC. Everybody moves here because they're making a lifestyle upgrade, or they're retiring to a better life, or they just want to move away from whatever mundane place they lived in before.

Everybody here is nice. Everyone's happy. They're just glad to be here. From all walks of life, they've all just melted together. The Clevelanders are just as happy to be here as the boys and girls from the Jersey shore. And the midwesterners wanted the same things in their new life as the New Englanders.

I have no idea why there's so many Pittsburgh people here. (Wink-wink!)

When you grow up in a small town as I did, you become accustomed to a certain way of life. And to a certain mentality of how you deal with people each and every day. You don't know what you don't know. When you go on vacation, no matter where you go, you live in a little fantasy world for a week or two. And then you come back to real life.

When you move away from all that, you understand the culture will be different on a fundamental level, but you don't know how different. When you move to a vacation spot, you wonder if there's gonna be some weird underbelly to the culture people don't see when they're visiting on vacation. We loved it here when we visited, and always saw how nice everybody was, but we honestly wondered if everything would be the same when we lived here everyday.

It is, and then some. I don't know if every vacation spot is like this, but this one is. The everyday culture is vastly different from midwest Indiana. It's hard to describe how different without living here in it everyday. The people here are as genuinely happy as they appeared to be when we vacationed here.

Combine all that with the weather, and it's very hard to be in a bad mood around here. Without fail, time and again, it has proved to be what we envisioned it would be. An authentically happy place.

Am I bragging? Maybe. Am I trashing my former hometown? Absolutely not! We loved Mooresville, and it was a great place to grow up and raise a family. But when small-town life is all you know, it's difficult to believe there's more to the outside world than meets the eye, and impossible to know that different cultures exist beyond our sphere of the universe, until you actually experience it.

For us, we knew there was a bigger world outside of Indiana, and we wanted to experience it. The goals (and needs) we had in life couldn't be completely met there. But a move like the one we made isn't for everybody, and I know a lot of really good, really happy people who are more than content to spend their entire lives in Mooresville, IN, and if that makes them happy, then I'm happy for them.

So here's to celebrating two years in the Lowcountry. We have loved every minute of it, and look forward to every adventure it brings our way in the coming years.

And remember, our door is always open. We love having family and friends in for a visit. And you can come by anytime. But be careful... the Lowcountry life gets in your blood very quickly. And before you know it...