Saying Goodbye to the Beach Shack

We've done it...we've moved. Little did we know that moving two minutes down the road would be so emotional. We LOVED our little beach shack! Yes, it was small; yes, mold would grow on the walls and we would have to clean it with bleach; yes, we had a church building in our front yard; and yes, the traffic on Portola Ave. was extremely loud (until they put in double paned windows for us), but even with all of those little "annoyances" we still loved it. Why? We were down the street from the ocean, we had space for a little tomato garden, we had an awesome little jungle spot for our hot tub, we lived by some of our best friends, and best of all it was our first home together...the place where we started our family.

I met (or re-met him as he would say) Brian on April 17, 2005 at a wedding, and he had just recently moved into the "beach shack." It just so happens that my sister and her husband had lived in the beach shack right before Brian, so I still had a key to the place.

A few days after that wedding I got a phone call from Brian, in which he mentioned that he had some of my sister's mail. I was literally down the street from the beach shack, so I told him that I would stop by to pick up the mail. During our conversation that night I mentioned how weird it was that I had a key to his house..."here you go, you can have a spare key now..." to which Brian responded, "you should hold on to it, you might need it some day...."

All I remember is giving him a strange look. I held on to the key and we continued our conversation. Little did I know that two and a half years later I really would be needing that key.

Goodbye beach shack...you were so good to us!