Zen Habits Offloaded

My family and I have made it official, and now that we're telling everyone, I may as well tell my beloved readers as well: we're moving to San Francisco next summer (2010).

And we're super excited.

We haven't bought plane tickets or reserved a house or apartment, but we're definitely set on going, and we'll be living in the city.

I know the burning question is why. The reasons are manifold, but here are a few:

• Guam will always be home, but we'd like to experience more of the world, and we'd love our kids to see more than this tiny little slice of life, however wonderful it is.
• San Francisco is one of my favorite places in the world - I lived there as a teen-ager, and I fell in love with it. It's beautiful, the people are diverse and crazy and awesome, there's no shortage of things for kids and teens and adults to do, the food is great, the weather is superb, and the areas around it are varied and gorgeous, from the California coastline to the mountains to the redwoods to wine country to Oregon to the north to Disneyland to the south (I know, but we have six kids, so.).
• As a blogger, I can work anywhere in the world, and I'd love to meet online blogging friends and readers in real life from time to time.
• As homeschooling parents, my wife and I want to expose our children to more opportunities to learn from the world around them. Guam is a great place for that, but San Francisco offers more. It'll be an incredible learning experience for our kids.
• We hope to go carless, and San Francisco is a good place to do that, with muni and BART and a cycling friendly city and the ability to walk and things like Zipcar and City CarShare if we need them. Guam is a very bad place to go carless if you have kids.
• I'm veg*n, and Guam is also a bad place for that. There's exactly one veg*n restaurant on Guam, and great as it is, I'd love to be in a place with more options. I can't wait to try veg*n restaurants in S.F., or at least restaurants with more veg*n options than, you know, *salad*. Farmers Markets and natural food co-ops and leftist bookshops and such are also attractive to a person like me. We also considered Portland and Eugene, OR as options, for these same reasons, but for complicated reasons S.F. is our choice.
• We have awesome family in the Bay Area, and I can't wait to spend time with them. Seriously, other than the family I have here on Guam, the ones in S.F. are among the rockingest I have.
• My oldest daughter will be a senior in high school next school year, and being in California will help her visit and apply to colleges and even establish residency should she decide to go to college in CA.
• I really like to buy used things, when I need to buy stuff, and Guam's options are, shall we say, limited.

Again, these are just a few. I could go on all day.

I love Guam, but it's time for a change. We'll always come back to Guam. We just want some new experiences, and we can't wait.

I hope to see some of you there!

Update: Do you live in San Francisco? Please, help me out by adding some info to this wiki: Moving to San Francisco.