Jill Thomas is a rambler, traveler, and storyteller with a big laugh who thinks its funny how life leads you right where you need to be, however the roundabout path.
On April 29th, 2024, my hubby Stormy and I left our home in Pensacola, Florida, abandoning the life we’ve loved for over a decade on the most beautiful beach in the world.
For the last 12 years, we’ve lived four feet from the water in densely packed townhouses with the best sunsets on earth - of which we've shared too many to count with neighbors I suspect will be the best we’ve ever had.
Living here was a journey that transformed our lives in many happy and beautiful ways, and it will be heartbreaking to leave. However, to travel like Stormy and I want to, we need to be less encumbered, so we decided to go.
Selling our house took much longer than expected and didn't go smoothly. It turns out that when it comes to friends who are real estate agents, you’re damned if you hire them and equally damned if you don't.
Nonetheless, our real estate delays provided us with unexpected months to plan our 2,870-mile move from northwest Florida to the west coast of Canada. Endless discussions took place—drive or fly? Take our orange cat Gingee with us or find her a new home? What stuff to keep and what to abandon—so many decisions, with ample time to overthink them all.
When we first decided to sell, I imagined us hiring movers and loading a shipping container. My expectations soon tightened to a U-Haul trailer, and eventually (with equal parts encouragement and eye rolls from Stormy), we agreed to take only what we could fit in the hatchback of our SUV (without blocking the windows). After all, our Canadian home already contained everything required for a life well lived.
We also agreed (Stormy more reluctantly than I) to take Gingee with us.
Stormy feels little attachment to stuff, so it was me who sorted our most sentimental items onto our guest room bed—the hand-carved wood turtle bought at an Art Show, the Pensacola Beach sign gifted by my now deceased neighbor Jan, and my favorite coffee mug.
Stormy was patient but occasionally intervened with a dose of cranky input — vetoing my trendy travel mugs or my copy of the Joy of Cooking, purchased in the nineties, brought to Florida a decade ago, and not opened since. It seems the Internet has deemed this one-time kitchen necessity redundant.
There were a few things I found especially hard to let go of—like the oversized yellow chair purchased for $75 at a flea market and the green bench in our front hallway that Stormy built out of scavenged dining room chairs. And . . . of course, our cruiser bikes. I will miss slow-riding home from the Paradise Bar on Sunday Funday, feeling just the right amount of drunk.
We spent weeks sorting through cupboards, drawers, and closets. We filled bins destined for Goodwill and offloaded stuff on visitors. After finalizing our choices, Stormy vacuumed-packed our keepsakes into enormous Ziploc bags and stacked them like a life-sized Jenga puzzle into our car.
When departure day finally arrived, we locked our front door and drove away, imagining new homeowners sleeping in our beds, pondering the pictures of our travels on our walls, and consuming the contents of our pantry.
Gingee found herself sitting on top of our worldly possessions in her new space bubble backpack, like a furry red cherry on top of a sentimental sundae.
The first 51 miles were familiar—we've driven from Pensacola, Florida, to Mobile, Alabama, hundreds of times. Yet, it felt unsettling to think we might never again see the Blue Angel fighter jets adorning Pensacola’s highway overpasses.
It might be a short time or a long while until we return. Life is unpredictable that way, and no one really knows if they will return to a place once they leave it behind.
Once at the city limits, we set our Waze to “no highways" and took our first unfamiliar turn just before entering downtown Mobile. We skipped the familiar I-10 tunnel on the route to New Orleans, exiting at the cruise terminal and driving towards Saraland and other previously unseen places.
We soon crossed the Mississippi state line and continued on Route 45 through Lee County - one among many places in this world named after men with ill-advised intentions. Route 45 was the first paved highway south of the Mason-Dixon Line - with its inaugural concrete laid down in 1914.
In Mississippi, even a fleeting view from a car window reveals the scars of America’s Civil War and all that came before it and since. Mississippi, after all, was home to the largest population of enslaved people in the Confederacy.
Slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and violent responses to Civil Rights initiatives followed by the establishment of the present-day school-to-prison pipeline remain indefatigably evident. This is a place marred by a steadfast denial of our ancestral sins.
Instead, contemporary exploiters, with their gun shops, dollar stores, and discount liquor outlets, continue to profit from the hopelessness and despair left in slavery’s wake.
Inside this desperate diorama are small towns, many named after white man’s conquests - like Yazoo (a long gone indigenous tribe) and another called Pocahontas??!! I’ve only seen poverty akin to this in Panama and Mexico. Its prevalence, here, in a country that brazenly claims to be the “best in the world”, creates an unsettling cognitive dissonance.
In these particular rural byways, dignity flourishes in the multitudes of simply built red brick churches with their identical pointy white steeples or under the Friday Night Lights in the local high school football stadium.
Before we left, Stormy and I agreed our road trip goals were to ramble at least 3 miles a day and not eat fast food. On this first day, we rambled 250 feet from our Red Roof Inn in Richland, Mississippi, to fetch dinner from the Wendy's franchise next door.
Gingee, however, was a rockstar. This was her first trip away from her sandy home, where our neighbor Chuck feeds her freshly caught fish and where cat treats could be reliably sourced in 3 different homes.
I was scared about how she would cope, so I stocked puppy pads and sedatives and practiced with her for weeks. I don't know if Ginger knows anything about life outside the beach, but I assume that to her, this trip must feel like what rambling to outer space would feel like to me.
However, on this first day, she was an orange cat rock star - sleeping for most of the ride and then dozing in our budget motel, purring like nothing in this world really matters. I was relieved and, I’ll admit, a little proud.
I'm a crazy cat lady. I own it, so it's okay if you laugh.
READ MORE > JT's Tales From The Trail
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