Changes...

For a little while now, we have felt that big life changes were coming. We have tried to follow promptings to do certain things to prepare and we felt impressed that New England was where the Lord wanted us, but we had no idea where. Often, a move is initiated by a job offer or a schooling program and so your criteria are good school districts, commute time, etc. When you aren't moving for either of those things and there are no little ones at home anymore, etc...where do you begin?? What was important to us? What were our goals? Where did He want us?

We knew we wanted to be within an hour of both a Temple and an airport. So, that eliminated Vermont and most of New Hampshire and Maine (we kept the very southeastern areas in). and then we did research and made a list of all the towns we were interested in. Then we went back through that list (again!) and narrowed it down to a minor list of 60 towns in four different states...Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Then, when you have a husband that is a spreadsheet master, you end up with a beautiful heat mapped spreadsheet with all of the cities and your criteria.

For those of you who don't know what a heat map spreadsheet is...don't feel bad...I didn't either

We had done our research, we had a list...now it was time to go see them all in person.