https://littlesunshinebakery.com
1.Are you ready?
Yes! And no. We’ve been packed for months, everyone is healthy, and we’ve moved out of our house and put our furniture in storage. But we’re currently running around like crazy trying to dispose of last-minute items and say final good-byes. You’re never REALLY ready for something like this.
2. Are you excited?
Yes! And the kids are, too. No, seriously, EVERYBODY asks this.
3. Where are you going first?
Road trip east across Canada. See page titled “Aspirational Itinerary”.
4. Where are you going to settle afterwards?
We don’t know at all. Promising ideas include the northern Rockies (Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah), Washington D.C. environs, or Lake Tahoe. But we’re just getting started on our trip, so cut us some slack on this one. Part of the purpose of this trip is to detach ourselves from our very comfortable and familiar home in California so we can make a more clear-headed choice.
5. What are you bringing with you?
Clothes for each person for 7 days, lots of computers and pads and phones and Kindles, musical instruments including my guitar, Shefler’s clarinet, Rainier’s violin, and a bouquet of recorders. Paper journals. Other odds and ends.
6. How do you have enough clothes for all those different climates?
In the SF Bay area, you get really good at layering. Plus, if you look closely at the Aspirational Itinerary, you will notice that Jeremy has cleverly designed it to follow relatively fair weather. We’re having our ski outerwear mailed to us when it is time for that. But finally, wherever we go, we expect to find climate-appropriate clothing for sale if we have messed up.
7. How did you decide to do this?
We have been wanting to leave the SF Bay area for a few years, but we couldn’t figure out where to go. We like our current home and neighborhood, and it was difficult to conceive of an existence in a new locale that wasn’t connected to a new job or family situation. Then this idea hit Anna while she was backpacking with Libbey and enjoying the freedom from stuff and house, the self-sufficiency of carrying everything you need on your back, and the adventure of looking back as you leave in the morning and seeing no trace left.
Jeremy crunched the numbers and then did some soul-searching as he was flirting with some job offers in DC, but we finally decided it was an offer we couldn’t refuse.
8. Why the name of your blog?
Well, we love movies and we went through a big obsessive phase with classic westerns and Kurosawa, so it’s inspired by the film The Magnificent Seven, essentially a remake of The Seven Samurai. Like Kurosawa we make mad films. Okay we don’t make films. But if we did they’d have a samurai. And there are seven of us. And many samurai in feudal Japan (in fact all of the ones in the movie) were itinerant mercenaries after losing their original masters. And we are itinerant. And we hope to be occasionally magnificent.