After 2 years of wanting to move to the Bay Area, heart of the Tech industry and one of the primary Internet development hubs of the world, this past week it finally happened.

That's right, I now live in California.

After having worked in our UK office for over a year now, I finally became eligible for a US L1 in August so then the Visa Application process started, which lasted until early September after which I had received, yessirree, my US Visa! :D

Then it was time to arrange the actual move and everything, which took a lot of stress (during the middle of all this, we launched the biggest redesign of the Online Store in the history of the store's existence, so imagine the stress...) but, in the end, it all worked out.

On Monday, Oct 1 (my birthday) I took the cats to the vet for a health certificate (for the flight to CA), then had two packers come in and pack up all my stuff for the shipment overseas (I wasn't allowed to pack anything myself due to US Customs then wanting to open it all up to see what's inside my boxes, causing extra costs and delays). After they'd gone, I was left with a mostly empty apartment, my suitcase, bag of gear (photography+macs) and the stuff for the cats (litterboxes and kennels). Suffice to say it was rather empty.

In the early-as-hell morning of Tuesday, October 2 it all finally happened. I got a cab to the airport (it was super late and that freaked me out :/ ) where I dropped off my babies at the Cargo Terminal, then went to the main terminal myself where I checked in and went to the Virgin Atlantic lounge. It's quite an awesome lounge, very spacey. There was a guy sitting not far from me who pulled out his mac at the same time as I did, to get on the wifi, and he and I ended up chatting all the way over to the plane when boarding started. Got along really well, so pretty much as soon as the plane took off and the Seatbelts On sign had turned off, he made his way down (he was in upper deck, I was in lower deck) and sat down on the footrest-slash-seat. We chatted for a few hours, during which we had our lunch right there at the seat (it was awesome).

Afterwards we just chilled in our own seats and watched movies and what not, but later on in the flight I went to his seat and we repeated the whole thing (but with roles reversed, i.e. me sitting in his footrest-slash-seat thing). Somewhere in the middle I got a back massage (part of Virgin when flying business) so yeah, all in all the flight was rather delightful and fun. In fact, it was pretty much the nicest London-SF flight I ever had, in every sense -- the Virgin Atlantic crew are awesome, funny people.

Arrival in SFO was less awesome though. Customs didn't take long at all, it was effectively a no-hassle experience, but getting my suitcase + extra luggage + cats was a total pain in the ass. It also took forever.

By 5-something pm (I arrived at 2pm) I was finally on my way to pick up Jina and head to the hotel. We dropped the cats off in the room and went to get some things at Petmart (Petsmart?) and then had dinner at Outback, keeping my tradition alive of having Outback for dinner on my arrival night in the US.

After that, I finally went to bed in California, having left Europe behind for real this time.

I was home.