Complex sentence: They left an upper-middle class life behind and traveled via ship to Panama, went overland, and caught a second ship to San Francisco, arriving while the city was recovering from the disastrous earthquake of October 21,1868.
Split into simpler sentences: They left an upper-middle class life behind and traveled via ship to Panama, went overland, and caught a second ship to San Francisco. They arrived while the city was recovering from the disastrous earthquake of October 21,1868.