After nearly 3 weeks on the road, we finally made it back to Massachusetts. Bijan and I had both scored travel assignments at our previous staff nurse jobs at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, and we were eager to get home and see our family, friends and former co-workers after nearly 9 months out west.

Our first stop once we got back into the Northeast was to visit Bijan’s parents in Binghamton. It was great to see family again, and also be able to sit on the couch with an iced coffee and watch crappy tv shows after a long non-stop road-trip. We took some walks at local parks with Charley and of course, since we had enough players again, had to squeeze in a game or two of Catan.

After leaving Binghamton we made our way to our final destination and our new “home,” Mansfield, MA. My parents were generous enough to let us stay with them for what ended up being 6+ months, which we are grateful for. We ended up taking over both me and my sister’s old bedrooms since we had too much stuff to fit in one room. Charley was so excited to see her BFF, River, again after all this time.

We had seen that one of our favorite bands, the Head and the Heart, were playing in Boston the weekend that we arrived home in October, so we got the whole fam to come with us to the show as a welcome home celebration!

We quickly got settled in at our new home, and we started work back at BIDMC. It was much easier adjusting this time around since we had worked on these floors for years prior to traveling and it was so great to see our friends at work.

Another reason we were so excited to get back home was that two of our best friends, Erika and Andrew, were about to have their baby boy! We got to meet sweet little Patrick soon after we got back!

We took a quick little weekend trip in November to see our friends, Mike and Devin, in Brooklyn, NY

We made a few trips back to Binghamton, one around Thanksgiving, and we went to Bijan’s class reunion with some of his high school friends.

Christmas pups! (Yes, my mom got stockings for all of the dogs LOL)

Bijan and I worked over the Christmas holiday, but we were able to make it down to Lake Norman in North Carolina to spend a few days with the whole Mangouri family.

We got to have a blast with all of our friends on New Year’s for Mike and Julia’s wedding in Northampton, MA!

Trip to Cayuga lake in the finger lakes to see Bijan’s high school friends in January.

With our Beth Israel contracts coming to an end, Bijan and I were having to make a decision about what we wanted to do next. We were going between sticking around in the northeast for a few more months, or heading back out to Arizona for our next travel assignment. Although we would have liked to go to Arizona, we decided to stay in MA for another assignment because we had a lot of loved ones getting married in 2020 and it would have been really difficult to make it back for all of the wedding festivities.

With that, I started a new travel assignment working night shift at Rhode Island Hospital on the oncology unit, and Bijan transferred to my old floor at BIDMC since his current floor no longer needed him.

We took a getaway to Woodstock, NH on a snowy weekend in February where we did some snowshoeing and hiking.

My BFF Kathryn’s bachelorette party in February in Burlington, VT.

When Covid hit, we were so glad to be home with family. Part of our decision to remain in the Northeast for through the beginning of 2020 was due to all of the weddings we had this year. With Covid, many of those were postponed. My brother came home from Umass for the rest of the year, so we were living with my parents, brother and the two dogs.

We engaged in all of the same activities as most people who are cooped up in the house – going for long walks, playing games, family dinners and stockpiling toilet paper and paper towels. My mom was so bored that she even learned how to play Settlers of Catan and liked it! We also did a lot of laying on the couch with the puppers.

We learned to appreciate the little things, and Bijan started practicing photography during our long walks around Mansfield downtown and Fulton’s pond.

One of our many competitive games of Catan:

A day hike getaway to the whites in NH:

We celebrated social distance birthdays for Bijan and Abbey:

Since the Jack’s UMass 2020 graduation was cancelled in May, we had a mini graduation for Jack in the front yard, and invited some family and friends to attend.

While Bijan and I were both placed on oncology floors for our second travel contract, we were often floated to covid floors during the last 8 weeks of our assignment.

We are grateful for the time we got to spend with our roomies!

From the start, when we decided to go into travel nursing, one of our destinations on our bucket list was Binghamton, NY, where Bijan grew up, to spend time with his family. We set our sights on Binghamton for our next destination. We ended up getting positions on 2 of the med/surg floors at Lourdes Hospital, where Bijan’s dad works as a surgeon. We said goodbye to my family in MA and headed for upstate NY for the summer.