Leaving Buffalo: A Move-ing Story

Moving is not for the faint of heart! The surgeon general should issue a warning against moving houses after age 50. Coordinating our cross-country move was one of the hardest thing I had done. Selling our house in Buffalo, finding a suitable rental house in the Bay Area, figuring out the logistics of the move, getting rid of the furniture we wouldn't transport, boxing everything up, and then on the other side unboxing everything and buying new furniture... It was simply exhausting.

Our move has been a long time in the works. For the last 6 years I have been working remotely, first for AWS and then for MongoDB Research, and I have been telling people I would move out of Buffalo any day now. Indeed we could have moved earlier, but we kept putting it off. We waited until my son finished high school, then tried to move last summer. But we got the house on the market too late and it fell through. By then I had already told people I was moving, including an entire table at OSDI 2025. So for this final attempt, I used the Russian approach and kept quiet until it was done. (As the story goes, the Soviet space program announced only the missions that succeeded, and stayed quiet about the ones that didn't.)

Escaping Buffalo's Gravity

I have been in Buffalo for 21 years, not counting two sabbaticals. That's a long time to stay in one place. Call it inertia or bad luck, but after so many stalled attempts I started to suspect that Buffalo had the escape velocity of a black hole. When I named my blog muratbuffalo, I didn't know the name would stick and almost become a curse.

I lived through 21 of the Buffalo winters, and they are tough. I remember one particularly bad one when the roads were covered with ice for a good 3 weeks and looked like Siberia (well, at least like what I imagine Siberia looks like, since I haven't been). There is virtually no sun during winter, and it gets bleak. I think I developed a seasonal affective disorder without even realizing it. I only caught on when my manager, after reading a post I wrote in February 2025, told me to take a couple of days off. 

If you are lucky enough to survive the winter (some people don't, seriously), you are rewarded with an unfamiliar bright orb in the sky come May. You get a couple of weeks of spring, and then you spring straight into summer, where it gets hot very quickly. Buffalo is humid too, so 80-90 degrees feels much hotter than it should. I am afraid I might be dragging this cursed humidity to the Bay Area with me, like Rob McKenna, the miserable Rain God lorry driver in Douglas Adams’s So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

The weather was only part of the reason. Buffalo is also not a big city. Every time I traveled to a proper big city like NYC, Seattle, or even Boston, I felt how much of the big-city action and energy we were missing.

But the biggest reason was family. My son Ahmet was already out in California. He had gone there for college, and then pivoted (as one does in California) to start his AI company. If we wanted to spend more time together as a family, this was the time and the place. We also figured the Bay Area, with all its opportunities, would be good for our two daughters' education and growth.

I am not claiming the Bay Area is all awesome, or that it beats Buffalo in every respect. I don't wear rose-tinted glasses. But one thing was clear: after 21 years, it was time to leave. Buffalo had come to feel routine, and change is good.

In Buffalo's defense, it was a great place to raise the kids, and I had good colleagues at CSE Buffalo and many fond memories. As Pat Helland liked to joke whenever I mentioned my plans to move out, "Buffalo is a great place to come from".

Oops, I did it again! Another cross-country trip

We were not going to take much furniture. Ours had been with us for a long time, and we wanted a fresh start there too. But even when you don't take much furniture, a family household depends on a surprising number of things that all need to be transported.

I realized this during our first move inside Buffalo. It felt like every closet in the house was springing with stuff, and no amount of boxing and cleaning got us to an empty house. Even knowing this, I got surprised again on every move since, including this last one. We sold, donated, and threw away so much stuff, I can't believe it. It turns out I keep wearing the same 3-5 things, and I found clothes I hadn't worn in more than 10 years.

I looked up the Pods moving solution, and it was ridiculously expensive: starting at $4K just to transport the Pod to the Bay Area, and dropped off (inshallah?) at a time they couldn't guarantee... These guys have higher margins than NVIDIA!

Then I looked at U-Haul. My 2022 Highlander came with a hitch included, and a U-Haul 12-by-6-foot trailer would solve our moving problem. It was surprisingly cheap, only $350 for a 9-day cross-country trip. So, somehow we were crazy enough to attempt another transcontinental drive.

When we picked up the trailer, it looked smaller than it had when we first went to see it. We thought this would leave half of our stuff behind. But playing Tetris as a child and as a procrastinating PhD student paid off. (True story: I used to play the Tetris built into Emacs, and I didn't know it tracked the highest score across the whole department until my friends congratulated me for topping it.) Well, thanks to all that training, we got everything in.

Best Laid Plans, Meet Cat

My plan for the roadtrip was to cross toward southwest coming from the north (I-90, I-70, I-44, and I-40), and finally driving back up to the Bay Area. This was a trailer friendly route that didn't cross high mountains.

It was more than 45 hours of driving. With a trailer you go slow. And since the trailer burns a lot of gas, you stop for fuel almost twice as often. We planned to leave on July 1st, and visit our friends at Kenyon College on the first day, so that first day was only a half day. Then Springfield, Missouri, then Amarillo, Texas, then Williams, Arizona, then a Grand Canyon visit, then Las Vegas, and finally the Bay Area.

Of course, we didn't book the hotels in advance. We would book each one on the day of travel from the phone, using Hotwire or the hotel sites.

Perfect plan, right?

On the morning of July 1st, we were doing the final cleanup and walkthrough prep on the house we had sold, and we let our cat Pasha out as usual. He rarely strayed far from the house and was always back soon. But the poor cat had been stressed for two weeks watching our furniture disappear. Every time a chair vanished, Pasha would inspect the empty void and glare at me as if to say, "You fools, what have you done to my house?" He must have been furious, because when we finished up with the final prep at the empty house, he was nowhere to be seen. We were supposed to leave at noon for our half-day first drive. Instead I spent the entire afternoon roaming the neighborhood like a deranged madman, calling his name and shaking his favorite snacks. It was brutally hot, and I got sunburned looking for him. I looked like a lobster... again.

Pasha didn't come back until 11:00 PM. We had to stay another night in Buffalo. At this point, my panic was real. I thought we were trapped forever in Buffalo's gravity well.

The next morning, after breakfast with friends in Buffalo, we finally got on our way, Pasha curled up in my daughters' laps. After all that buildup, leaving Buffalo felt anticlimactic.

The drive was nice and boring for the most part. Driving with a trailer is not hard, but backing up is very tricky. So I parked accordingly at the hotels and service stations. Not fun.

Another thing that wore on me was the state of the American highways. Some stretches looked like freshly bombarded potato fields. Missouri was the worst. You hit a crater, your spine compresses, you worry about your tire rims, and a full second later, the 5000-pound trailer hitched to your bumper hits the exact same hole with even a louder bang. The government seems to always find money for overseas misventures, but fails to fix the roads that millions of Americans drive on every day.

I listened to the Science of Discworld books while driving, which kept me occupied. But it was hard to do anything with the cat along. When he attempted another escape at lunch on day 2, we scratched the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas plans and just drove. My daughters were very cooperative with our crazy plan. As long as they had the phones to keep them busy, they didn't mind the drive. They even managed to keep Pasha soothed during the trip.

We traveled through the heatwave in the first week of July. More than 100F in Arizona, 95F in California almost the whole way, but the Bay Area still showed 75F? What is this black magic?

Landed, Still Partly Unpacked

Well, we did it. In one piece (well, two, if you count the trailer), and it has been a week now. We are still unpacking and buying new furniture.

The move itself was exhausting, and adjusting to a new place turns out to be its own kind of work. A lot of little things are different. For example, why are there no bottle redemption centers inside the supermarkets in the Bay Area? Where are we supposed to recycle the bottles? And what are these tiny microscopic ants coming into the house, and how do I stop them?

OK, let's not dwell on these. Good weather. A lot of CS and AI action here. Please suggest good meetups, activities, and places to see around the Bay Area.