MJ Caldwell

My name is MJ. I am a 40 year old, recently married, mother of 2 teenagers, an animal lover, and a full-time graduate student. For the past 20 years I have resided in San Diego, CA, where I have raised my children, worked as an admissions advisor and career development coordinator for various colleges and enjoyed what San Diego had to offer.

My new husband lives in Central, CA in an agricultural city called Visalia, which is nowhere near comparable to San Diego. If you did a Google search on “San Diego, CA”, the results would return, population 1.3 million and 681 things to do. San Diego has a rainbow of people, cultures, ethnicities, and orientations. It holds within it multiple colleges and Universities, theaters, malls, beaches, lakes, mountains, deserts, and more beautiful weather than just about anywhere else in the US. Visalia, however has a population of 127,000. It is flat, hotter than the gates of hell in summer, smells like cows, and doesn’t have much to do within the city aside from shopping and movie theaters. However, right outside Visalia lies multiple adventures if you know where to look.

Shortly after getting married this year, Husband’s company started sending him off on short 1-2 month jobs both in state and out of state, but never close enough to come home after work. It is from one job site to the another, without much of a break between, if at all. Husband works for an alternative energy company supervising the construction of solar fields. Usually these jobs are in the middle of nowhere, where there is plenty of land; places which include dairy farms and wheat fields, and the population is around 5,000. Well, being newly married and newly uprooted from my home, I made it clear that I didn’t leave San Diego to live alone in a “Podunk” town like Visalia. We had just spent our entire relationship doing the long distance thing, and a long distance marriage wasn’t the plan. I told Husband that where ever he was being sent, the dogs and I would be going with him. This was going to be my way of getting to live with and spend whatever off time he had available with my new husband. Also, it would allow us both to take advantage of the opportunity to experience our United States of America.

I intend to find the interesting in the uninteresting and to include these adventures in my travel blog www.travelpodunkusa.weebly.com