Photos from our trip out of New Orleans to Tennessee this month :)

When we bought our Tennessee home last June, we didn’t really know how often we’d be able to be there. We knew for sure we’d want to do summers in Tennessee (New Orleans summers are torturous), and then maybe rent it out the rest of the year. So we packed up our lives in New Orleans and traveled to Tennessee and figured we’d just see how we feel.

It was about two weeks into us being at our new home that we realized we might have stumbled into a bigger life change than we’d originally planned. We quickly fell in love with the property and surrounding area and with how at peace we felt when we were there. It’s like our eyes were suddenly opened to a new reality of what life could look like – quiet mornings punctuated by deer and rabbit sightings, days spent traversing the rivers near our home, nights spent reading or, for Matt, doing creative writing, or having a bonfire on our friends’ nearby farm.

Side note: It was actually a twilight bonfire in August of 2021, during our Hurricane Ida evacuation from New Orleans to our friends’ home in this part of Tennessee, that first made me feel like we were somewhere special. I was laying back in the gravel looking at the mountains while the fire cracked and saw the fireflies start to come out. I felt more at peace, like internally, than I had for most of my adult life. And then I realized we were literally evacuating from a huge scary natural disaster and if I was feeling the most relaxed I’ve ever felt in my life in that moment then maybe my life was trying to tell me something.

So we ended up spending almost the entire remainder of 2022 there, and even had our wedding on the property this past November. And since then, we’ve kind of been stuck in this odd limbo of not knowing where to do our lives. Recently, though, I think we’ve pretty much settled on the obvious truth: we can do our lives in both places.

It’s not even a new concept! Being “bicoastal” is a whole lifestyle! And for us, that just looks like splitting our time between the swamp and the mountains. It’s not quite what we expected to happen, but here we are. The current plan is to spend the majority of the year in Tennessee. We’ll head back to New Orleans for big life events (like Matt’s little brother’s WEDDING in October!!), winter holidays, maybe through Mardi Gras, and then leave sometime in February. Of course with the option to go back sooner or stay there longer if we feel like it.

Even though it’s not perfect (just as much as we love getting to experience both places, we also definitely miss the people in each place whenever we’re in the other), it’s a huge privilege to get to choose where to live our lives, and we couldn’t be more grateful. And I don’t think it’s something we’ll be able to do forever. The going back and forth whenever our little hearts desire won’t be sustainable once we have kids to consider, but for the foreseeable future, I think it’s the option we’ve landed on.

It’s a little hard for me to wrap my head around the uncertainty of where we may be at any given month of the year, or what it all might look like in five years. But part of my 2023 goal is to shift my mindset from future planning to present appreciation. I’m trying to just enjoy what’s right in front of me.
Thank you for following along on this journey with us, and we’re excited to share our summer adventures in Tennessee with you here and on Instagram & TikTok 🙂

Xoxo

Beau

& Matt & Fox & Barley & Rye

Transitioning Back to Mountain Life: Where Do We Even Live?