This is Eric, Elizabeth’s husband, writing today. Elizabeth is feeling tuckered and I offered to do a guest post to keep her on the good side of the National Blog Post Month gods. I’m deeply sorry if there’s poor grammar, my english wizard is asleep.

Before the roadtrip through middle America, I had never had a London Fog before—a concoction of Earl Grey, vanilla syrup, and frothed milk. Our friend in St. Louis offered it, I asked what it was, and gave it a try. Now I’m a guy who enjoys the occasional London Fog—it’s part of who I am.

For 24 years of my life, I’ve been a guy who’s lived in Texas—never more than 200 miles away from my wonderful family. A few times I’ve looked out at wonderful places like Munich, San Francisco, Boston, and New York, and tried to imagine myself there.

But I doubted myself. Ach! I just want to go live a glamourous big city lifestyle and like many others find I’ve been deceived by Hollywood and the skewed view I’ve had of each city from my comfortable hotel room in downtown locations.

Portland Maine bypassed all those doubts. I’ve never seen a movie take place there, I’ve never been there. My only view of it is the pictures I’ve seen on Flickr slideshows, which have been very nice. We also considered Eugene, OR but found Portland, ME an easier place to get to from San Antonio. Our families are precious to us and we didn’t want to make visiting too difficult.

The reasons for going are proximity to those big cities I love, an old town style downtown, the sea, the cold, among other things. The distance from our family I imagine, I hope will push us to become more outgoing. We realized we would be okay with it’s small city size when we realized how little we take advantage of typical big city pleasures—night life, music, the arts, and so on.

Maybe after a month of being there in our temporary apartment we’ll find we hate it and come back. I’ll be the guy who wanted to live somewhere else, was smart enough to test drive it first, and decided I liked Austin better. It’ll change me in a small way and become a story for me to share with others. Or maybe I’ll stay and become a Mainer and help get civil unions (read:marriage in everything but name) allowed for gay couples.

I posted the picture of Zoe, the baby, reaching out to grab her mom’s chainlink necklace. Maybe one day she’ll always wear chainlink necklaces. Right now, her reaching out and exploring it is expanding her understanding of the world. I guess as an adult, testing life in an entirely new place is my chainlink necklace.

What’s your chainlink necklace? What’s experiences have expanded your worldview and changed you ever so slightly?