In three days we move to North Carolina. Normally I would never want to move across country only 20 months after I just did it but in this case it offers some hope of a normal life. The weirdest thing is to think about what happened to us since coming back to California. We could never have anticipated what a strange experience it would be. We had a great roadtrip across from Florida to San Luis Obispo, where we planned to live. Once we arrived and got a hotel room, we immediately looked for an airbnb so that we would have a base from which to look for a rental. We found a great one in Pismo, a newly built two bdrm apartment- so far so good. We started looking at both rentals and townhouses for sale, to cover both bases. Wow was that depressing. The houses for sale, even at the very top of what we could afford, were absolutely gnarly and falling apart. Some had the most atrocious views, like of a dozen AC units humming on the care home next door. All were just dreadful. The rentals weren’t much better- tiny and barely even habitable. In one of them the bedroom was more like a closet, and the windows looked out on the railroad changing station where railcars switch lines all day. The scary part was that these awful rentals were filled to the brim with students and families looking, all eager to turn in their applications as fast as possible. There was one rental that we really liked. It was tiny and we had no idea where we’d put our stuff- 800 sq ft with no garage or storage- but we wanted it badly since it was the only one we could imagine ourselves spending more than one night in. We applied and waited.

While looking at more disgusting apartments, I was stung by a tarantula hawk wasp, the second most painful insect bite. It hurt like hell! I just wanted to go home at that point, to my beautiful house in Florida. I found out that wasps are in abundance in California because of the drought. Indeed, California looked incredibly dry and dusty. We hadn’t realized the drought was so bad because since leaving California in 2011 and since the drought had started in 2012, I’d visited Santa Barbara twice in April right after rains.

A few days later we went into the realtor’s office to ask about our application. It was in a folder labeled with the address of the apartment, with about two inches thick of other applications. Needless to say, we didn’t get that apartment. We were starting to feel desperate. Our Uhaul uboxes had arrived so we asked Uhaul to store them longer for us.

My parents and my son came to visit, and we spent a day at my sister’s house in Santa Barbara. We had chosen San Luis Obispo since we thought it would be cheaper than high-flying Santa Barbara, but in desperation we looked at some rentals while in Santa Barbara. We needed a garage for Ron to make the hardware for his business and we needed a washer and dryer, since come on, we’re over 40! We found an apartment that had both and drove down from Pismo a few days later to sign the lease. Santa Barbara School District wouldn’t tell us if the school was full until we came in with a signed lease- what is with that? How can you plan where to live without knowing if you will get in the school? So we came with a signed lease and found out that the lovely school we were zoned for was full. The next best school was full as well. Even the school we didn’t really want, the third best, was also full. We were going to be placed in a school all the way across town. We felt defeated. Next, we did the walk-through of the rental and found out why the lease had been odd. The lease we’d signed said we were responsible for all maintenance, even of the pipes and electrical. We noticed that nothing was working, not the dishwasher or even the fridge. We panicked. But luckily we were able to get out of the lease. And the school situation. We were relieved but fearful. Where would we live? School was starting in 2 days. We had arrived with over three weeks to find a place, but that wasn’t enough. Finally we found a place, but it was more expensive than we’d planned for, didn’t have a garage and didn’t have a washer and dryer, and it was in Santa Barbara in the school zone for a snooty school that we hadn’t liked when my son went there. But at least we had a place.

We took my daughter to register for school and found out that California has a new law. She was no longer exempt from vaccinations as she’d been when we lived here before. Despite her having had a serious reaction previously, and her brother the same, the doctor would not write her an exemption, and also would not space out the vaccinations. He pressured us terribly and would not budge. I think I made a mistake that day because I agreed with him. I got my daughter vaccinated with all the shots she needed and as she walked out she collapsed on the ground. I feared for her life. But she woke up. From that day she had a severe rash all over her body every night for three months. I felt so bad.

The rental wasn’t ready so we had to drive over an hour from Pismo every day and back to take my daughter to school. We were so happy to have started on the first day though. We noticed the tires were making a lot of noise so we took them in to get new ones and found that a certain bolt made that impossible. My husband wanted to just get a new car since our car is getting old. And I agreed to look. This was a mistake too because new cars all have concave headrests that are bad for someone 5’2” and looking was so draining. We didn’t find anything. Instead we got the tires and took our car in to get smog checked, only to find out that California wouldn’t pass my car. We tried everything, driving it in certain patterns to get it to pass but couldn’t. I was in a panic because I couldn’t imagine finding a new car in our current situation. Finally we found a mechanic who was able fix the car and pass it. Another huge relief.

I was kind of happy that we’d ended up in Santa Barbara because I had many friends still living here who I’d kept in contact with and visited whenever I was in town. I was excited to see them again. But that didn’t happen. One said “I’m pretty busy nowadays.” Another just kept extending our meeting to a week later. I recently found out an explanation for this in a blog. But it hurt and was unexpected. Now I realize it’s not that these friends weren’t real friends. They were true friends. But something about someone moving away and coming back just doesn’t work for some people. California didn’t greet us with open arms. We were sad.

We finally moved into our rental after three weeks of driving an hour and twenty minutes in the morning, waiting for seven hours around town with nowhere to go, and then driving back an hour and twenty minutes.

We were very grateful to have the airbnb where we could cook dinner for that whole month. We were so thankful to the lady that we washed all the sheets and towels ourselves before the cleaner came and left the place in sparkling condition. But alas, the owner would not return our $500 deposit! She was super mean too. We filed a credit card dispute. I told them our side and we were supposed to write it all out and mail it to the disputes department, but I got kind of scared of how mean the lady was and decided not to since she had a lot of our personal information. Well, in the end, we won the dispute without even having to write the letter! I guess they talked to her and realized how crazy she was and gave us the money back anyway. Lesson happily learned: always pay with credit card. But it was disappointing to realize that people can be so mean, when you are feeling so generous toward them.

We moved into our new place and were grateful that our belongings were fine even after seven weeks in the Uboxes. Luckily, too, my daughter got a very nice teacher at her new school. Some of the kids, though, kept reminding her that she was new, or that she didn’t own 15 pairs of shoes only three, or that she had missed out on all the cool festivities last year or the year before, so settling in was pretty rocky.

A month after we moved in, as we walked out of the grocery store to look at the flowers outside, my daughter and I were hit by a car that was flooring it and drove all the way into the very back of the store smashing the registers. I thought my daughter had died. And I got a knee injury that still gives me pain today. It took me a long time to get over this trauma and to not be jumpy every time I went out anywhere. I still feel nervous going to the store, but I can do it now pretty well. This set us back, because now I couldn’t carry the laundry down the huge flight of steps to the coin laundry room. Now my husband had to do laundry all Saturday morning, a most ridiculously time-consuming thing that is so easy if it’s just in your house! How stupid California is that most of the housing built does not have a w/d inside. Even some luxury homeowner townhouses in LA don’t have this!

My husband was adjusting to a whole new life and having no time to himself so this laundry thing was a real pain. A few weeks after we moved to California, his business that we’d had since we got married in 2004 died because Google made the same technology. We were used to being together all day and traveling like crazy all the time. But this all had to end. Luckily he found a job right away. We were very grateful. But they put him at a desk that was a thoroughfare and he was so exhausted from all the noise. Thank goodness he asked for a different desk after a few months.

So we were really not having a great time! In fact we started fighting all the time, when we’d been so happy in Florida and just bursting with hope. It was quite astounding to notice the difference between our happiness in Florida and how we felt in California. It was night and day! I just wanted to go back. Everything in me wanted to go back. It was like I couldn’t hold myself here, but we had to, for Ron’s job.

Now I know that it’s not true that geography is not the answer. In some cases it is very much the answer, or in this case, the problem. You can be a guy who can’t find a girlfriend in snooty California, and then move to another state, and bam! Instantly you have a girlfriend. Or like me- I had the sweetest friends in Florida. The saying “bloom where you’re planted” is not always true. Sometimes the soil is just crunchy from drought!

This is a hike we did that first week. We noticed the drought a lot when we first arrived. California was so different to how it had been five years before, when we left.

I went to a French meetup, since that is where I met many of my friends in Florida. But it was at a restaurant where you pay $30 a plate and the lady looked me up and down as I walked in. Snoot snoot…

Nonetheless, we started to settle in to a normal life of work, going for walks on cliffs over the sea, hunting for sea glass, enjoying the spring flowers when everything is green again, picnics in the sunshine with a cool breeze, and making the most of what California has to offer.

How California can look, in spring, after rains.

Some nice things that came from our move to California were reunions. We met up with my cousins and aunt from Australia in Malibu for a very special day- my daughter met her same-age cousin, Kimi, for the first time. And we enjoyed a reunion with my brother and his girlfriend from Hawaii, my niece and nephews, and my nephew’s girlfriend, and my son at my sister and her husband’s vacation home in the mountains. We also met up with friends from Florida who now live in SF for two wonderful weekends. And we had some lovely times in Pismo that first month when my parents and son visited.

Then exactly a year after we arrived at that first hotel in California, again during the time when all the students are looking for rentals, we noticed a weird smell in our townhouse. As it turns out it was mold from a leak that was going under the floor. The landlord was just ignoring us, but finally we got them to come out. This started weeks of trying to get our place fixed, while we stayed in a hotel, of which they said they would only pay one night. It was summer so the hotel, one of the cheapest in town, was $350 on the weekend nights (this is another reason why Santa Barbara is a ridiculous place to live- you just aren’t safe if the hotels are too expensive to stay in when you need them). The price was really adding up. The landlord didn’t care in the slightest about us, our health, or our belongings. It was quite shocking how little they cared, and how they were telling lies to try to cover for themselves. In the end they got a company to come out who didn’t isolate the area, and as a result we were told that all of our belongings were contaminated. We could either put them all in a pesticide fog, or abandon them. I didn’t want my daughter playing with toys or sitting on a couch fogged in pesticide, so Ron went in with a hazmat suit during four days of 100 degree temperatures, and wiped down whatever he could, anything plastic, metal, or glass. He saved some precious things- he was a hero. Other things we couldn’t keep. We lost a lot, almost everything. The most painful to let go of were our two super comfy leather couches. We still haven’t replaced these with anything like them (since only a tiny couch will fit in our current rental).

We found out months later that someone moved into our old apartment, and moved out two weeks later, suffering horrible allergies. Wow. We felt glad we had left the contaminated belongings behind. Health is everything.

We were out thousands of dollars, and I was spending all day trying to research what to do about mold-contaminated belongings, asthma from mold, renters insurance, all on dodgy hotel wifi. I was also starting my daughter in a new year of school, making lunches in a hotel room, and planning her birthday party from a hotel. At that time, my car broke and also both our cell phones broke, and the sapphire fell out of my wedding ring, never to be found again. It was weird times! At this time, I got stung by a wasp again, the only two times I’ve been stung by a wasp in my life.

We couldn’t find a rental. Again. So we took one that smelled funky, like cooking oil. When we moved in we all started to get sick, my daughter the worst. After ten days we got it mold tested and sure enough, under the kitchen sink it was buckling and the whole house was infested with mold spores. We moved out immediately, that day, in order to save the new stuff we’d bought. We were so angry! What is with landlords in Santa Barbara? Is it that there are so many people looking for a rental that they feel they can just treat you any way they like? We didn’t want to stay in a hotel again for weeks. We didn’t know what to do! I had almost no energy left to look for a place again. I wanted to curl in a corner of the hotel bed and do nothing. So we took a 670 sq ft rental in a new housing complex for $2650 a month. We were very sad because our daughter would have to change schools. We also hated the view of the taller building next to us, with not even a slither of sky in the view. But we took this rental, thinking at least it can’t possibly have any problem since it’s new. We felt scared, ominous, but we thought what could possibly be wrong with this one?

Some things went well, by pure mercy. My daughter met a sweet friend in the neighborhood and she got the best teacher and class ever. She made a poster that things happen for a reason. I felt happy.

But then two weeks after moving in, my daughter’s and my skin were like a nightmare. Our skin was all white and scratched up, with cracked bleeding areas all over, and we itched and burned like mad after every shower. I got the water tested and sure enough it had 150 ug/L of trihalomethanes in it, almost double the health limit. I was determined to get this solved since I could not move my daughter AGAIN! No way could this happen! She now had a friend and a great school and she had hope that things happen for a reason. So I did all I could. I spoke on TV, in the newspaper, found the help of an environmental researcher who wrote a letter to the paper and called the water company, Ron went to the water board meeting, I wrote to the mayor and called the state office that oversees the water company. I did everything!

We went to visit Florida for a vacation for a week and my skin was fine. We evacuated the smoke of the Thomas fire and stayed in Morro Bay and then Hawaii for eighteen days, and my skin was fine. Every time I returned to Goleta my skin became white and covered in cuts again.

From all that work of contacting people about the water, I found out that forty other people had the same symptoms as us since moving to Goleta (I am still meeting more today. I just met one mom who told me out of the blue- I hadn’t mentioned the water- that she is very sick and has spent thousands on treatments for eczema. She showed me her hands, all cut up, and said it started when her son was born. I asked when she moved to Goleta and she said when her son was born). I found out that most of the people with symptoms live in Ellwood or other areas at the end of the distribution lines, where trihalomethanes have more time to form. Trihalomethanes are a reaction between chlorine and ash/grasses that have formed in the lake because of forest fires and the lake being empty during the drought. The longer the water sits in the pipes, the more these cancer-causing chemicals form. I looked into filters, tried five different expensive shower filters, but found out from experience and from talking to researchers that nothing works for this. The water company has to filter out the ash and grasses BEFORE they add chlorine (Santa Barbara does this)- the consumer can’t do anything. It took me months to find all this out.

I called the school district and found out that we can’t stay in this school unless we live in this water district (and the school is in the neighborhood at the end of the distribution lines). And so I resigned to having to move my daughter again. So we are transferring to North Carolina. I can only hope for better times ahead. It is affordable to buy a home there, making you much safer since you can get a reputable company yourself if you must remediate a leak. And there is no drought there. I just found out they have water problems themselves (PFOAs) but I am hoping that things will be better. I have prayed at a little shrine to St Anne behind a beautiful Spanish church in Santa Barbara, and so I have hope.

I have learned some very important truths from this experience. Firstly, never move somewhere more expensive than where you’re at, unless you just won three million dollars. And secondly, if you’re happy where you are, even just mildly happy, or a little bored but enjoying a fairly pleasant life, don’t move! Thirdly, if you move back somewhere you used to live, don’t expect to have old friends there- your relationships might have changed. And lastly, don’t ever ever move to California, especially during a drought!

St Anne shrine behind Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Santa Barbara.

Plaque underneath the statue of St Anne.