At the entrance to Dragon Lights Reno during one of our final autumn evenings in the city.
Dragon Lights returned to Rancho San Rafael as autumn closed in over the valley, the way it had the year before, except this time we knew it was the last one we would see from here.
Inside the Wilbur D. May Arboretum, familiar paths ran through a temporary landscape of silk, wire, and colored light. The 2025 installation, Odyssey of Waves & Woods, opened with a red-and-gold Chinese dragon, moved through an illuminated ocean of whales and jellyfish, and closed among glowing mushrooms and woodland animals.
Beneath the red-and-gold dragon at the center of the Asian Culture Zone.
Families moved slowly through the displays. Children stopped beneath the larger figures. Sea creatures and flowers appeared against the dark in corners of the arboretum most visitors only knew by daylight.
The Odyssey of Waves section turned the garden path into an illuminated ocean.
A lantern whale suspended above waves, fish, and glowing sea grass.
We had spent days at Rancho San Rafael across several seasons. Returning there in November felt different from those earlier visits. The park was still hosting public life exactly as it always had. At home, our calendar was narrowing toward a date.
Lantern blossoms rising from a floor of fallen leaves.
Watch the accompanying short: Dragon Lights Reno: Light and Wonder in the Dark
Thanksgiving, Three Weeks Out
On Thanksgiving morning, we walked the foothill trail behind our apartment, the same route we had walked in every season that year: summer dust, autumn color, and now the bare clarity of late November. We knew where it climbed, where the gravel loosened, and where the neighborhood dropped out of sight behind the ridge. The trail looked the same as always. We were the ones who were different, three weeks out from a departure the hills had no way of knowing about.
Looking across the valley from the foothills behind our apartment during the final weeks in Reno.
Three weeks remained before departure. Thanksgiving gave us a pause in a month otherwise shaped entirely by moving tasks. We spent time with friends, shared meals, and came home each time to rooms that were already beginning to look different.
We were grateful for our marriage, for the health God had given us, and for the grace that had steadied our daily life through a demanding season. Living Stones had welcomed us with warmth from the start. Serving on the Connections Team and taking part in Community Groups had given us friendships built through Sunday mornings, shared meals, Bible study, and small acts of service, the kind that accumulate slowly and are hard to see clearly until they are about to end.
Friends opened their homes to us for Thanksgiving celebrations that year. Their hospitality made the coming separation more immediate than a calendar date had until then, and it also gave us a good way to spend one of our final holidays in Nevada.
Along the Truckee Riverwalk during the final autumn weeks in Reno.
There was no formal farewell built into the day itself. We walked, ate, gave thanks, and went back to the apartment. The final weeks kept moving.
One Last Drive West
Before the pace of the move overtook everything else, we drove west to Truckee and Lake Tahoe one more time.
Downtown Truckee under clear December skies, with snow beginning to settle across the Sierra.
We started with coffee in Truckee and a short walk through the historic center before continuing toward Tahoe’s east shore.
Seasonal decorations appearing along Truckee’s historic commercial streets.
Coffee in Truckee before continuing toward Lake Tahoe.
At Sand Harbor, winter light moved across the water and the granite around it. The trails were nearly empty, and the colder season had already settled into the higher ridges. We stopped for photographs, including the one that became our Christmas card that year.
At Sand Harbor for the photograph that became our 2025 Christmas card.
One last December stop along Tahoe’s east shore before the move resumed.
By late afternoon we were back on the road to Reno. The apartment still waited to be cleared, and everything ahead of us now had a fixed date attached to it.
The Last Public Evening
In early December we went to the Holiday Lights Festival in Reno’s Riverwalk District. The city Christmas tree stood at City Plaza. Vendor booths lined the walkway. Families waited for photographs with Santa while a local band played nearby, and lights strung along the bridge threw long, wavering reflections onto the Truckee River.
The Reno Christmas tree at City Plaza during the Holiday Lights Festival.
Christmas performers at City Plaza on a cold December evening.
A local band playing beneath the lights of downtown Reno.
Santa receiving families at City Plaza during the Holiday Lights Festival.
It was a modest civic gathering, scaled for the people who lived nearby rather than for visitors, and in that sense it summed up much of what our time in Reno had actually been. Public events here were frequent, accessible, and built into the daily life of the city rather than staged for outsiders.
Holiday lights crossing the Truckee River during our final public evening in Reno.
By the time we left the riverfront, the festival had become our last public outing in the city.
The Decision About Shadow
We had hoped, at first, that Shadow might travel with us.
The itinerary called for eleven countries and seventeen cities in the first year alone, with a second year of travel still taking shape. We began researching what it would take to bring her, assuming there would be some manageable way to make the journey work for all three of us. The conclusion only became clear once we traced out the actual requirements.
Most destinations required a veterinarian-issued health certificate within ten days of travel. Some also required rabies antibody testing and waiting periods measured in months, not days. Every new border meant another documentation cycle, another deadline, and another point where a missed step could cause delay, quarantine, or outright refusal of entry. Arranged independently across an itinerary this long, the total cost of flights and documentation could run from roughly $8,000 to $18,000, and professional relocation services would have cost more still.
Some countries required more than a certificate. Turkey and Montenegro required a rabies titer test, with blood drawn at least thirty days after vaccination and a three-month waiting period to follow. If a booster lapsed by even a day, the results became invalid and the clock started over. Official guidance from several of the countries on our route carried the same warning: a missed step could mean quarantine or refusal of entry, with no appeal once it happened. We read accounts of travelers who made the system work for a couple destinations. We also read accounts of travelers whose pets were turned away over a single timing error.
The larger concern was what the itinerary would actually do to her regardless of paperwork. Every move meant a carrier, an airport, unfamiliar rooms, new sounds, another period of adjustment, repeated over and over on a schedule built for us, not for her.
She would stay in the United States with family who already knew and loved her, in a stable home with consistent care and none of the repeated stress our route would have put on her.
The decision was responsible. It was also painful.
Shadow supervising the packing, as she had through every stage of the move.
Shadow had been present from Seattle and through the entire Reno chapter. She occupied boxes before they were packed, watched from the couch while furniture disappeared around her, and positioned herself in the middle of whatever task most needed an empty floor. As the apartment changed shape week by week, she remained one of its few constants. She would travel with us to Texas and stay there through the January transition. She would not continue overseas.
The Last Days in the Apartment
The Penske truck arrived outside the apartment on December 17.
The Penske truck outside our Reno apartment on December 17, the final day of loading.
By the final week, the living room was filled with packed items. Most of the decisions had already been made; what was left was physical.
Shadow moved through the boxes and the open spaces that used to be furniture. She watched from the couch, climbed into containers, and followed us from room to room as the layout disappeared around her. Errands in those last days followed routes we had driven all year, past the grocery store, the gym, the coffee shop, and the turns that had shaped the past year’s weeks. There was no need to stop at any of them. Their repetition had already made them part of the place we were leaving.
The final evening was given over to checking rooms that had already been checked. Cabinets were opened again. Closets were examined a second time. Small items kept turning up in corners and drawers long after everything important seemed to be gone. Shadow stayed close, moving through rooms that no longer looked like home.
We walked through the apartment once more before the morning we left. The spaces once occupied by a desk, a television, shelves, and the accumulated belongings of fourteen months had gone back to blank walls and open floor, with almost nothing left to show for the life that had filled them.
Leaving Reno
GTT. Gone to Texas.
We left at sunrise on December 18. The truck and the car pulled away from the apartment and onto streets we had driven hundreds of times before. Morning light reached the foothills as we crossed the valley, and Reno stayed visible behind us for several miles, compact enough from the highway to take in the whole city at once beneath the surrounding slopes. Beyond the last neighborhoods, the road opened south and east, toward Texas and toward family waiting there for Christmas.
That drive belongs to a different chapter. This one ends here, at the edge of Reno.
The Place We Left
We had chosen Reno for practical reasons. It gave us a manageable place to live while we prepared for a much larger journey. Fourteen months gave those practical advantages time to become something more.
The city became home through repetition: worship, work, shared meals, local events, hikes, errands, and friendships that had time to deepen because we stayed long enough for them to. Reno was also where Some Great Place began. The first issue of Living Local Weekly was published there in August 2025, before the international journey started, built by looking closely at the life already around us.
That made leaving Reno more than the completion of a move. It was the first time this project asked us to leave a place we had already learned to see clearly.
Reno was not the only home in this story, though. Texas is where we were born and raised, where we married, and where our children spent their early years, long before Seattle or the fourteen months that just ended here. Leaving Reno meant driving toward family for the holidays before the larger journey began, not away from everyone we knew. That gave the goodbye its own shape: relief and homecoming sitting right next to a loss that was still real.
Reno at dusk, at the close of the fourteen-month chapter in which Some Great Place began.
Practical Notes
- Time in Reno: approximately fourteen months, October 2024 through December 18, 2025.
- Departure date: December 18, 2025.
- International pet travel: requirements can include short health-certificate windows, government endorsement, rabies antibody testing, waiting periods, and different rules at every border. Research this early if you are weighing whether a pet can travel with you.
- Shadow stayed with family in the United States, with a stable home and consistent care.