My first job after I graduated college was as a journalist on the Christchurch (New Zealand) Press. As young New Zealanders typically do, I soon set off to see the world. My husband and I emigrated from our birth country in the early 1960s, I with a roving commission from the editor of the Press to seek out New Zealanders who had led newsworthy lives abroad and send back profiles, along with any other stories I might find. We moved first to England, then to California in 1967, a time when the apricot and cherry orchards of the Santa Clara Valley were being transformed into Silicon Valley and we were just one of the newly arrived high-tech worker families among the many. Decades later, on a return visit to see family, my mother handed me a cardboard box stuffed tight with all the letters I had written home. This treasure trove, along with my scrapbook of newspaper stories, became the primary sources for the journal entries archived here.