moving

Moving happened!

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We have moved!  We live in this house now.  And while we are both occasionally overtaken by fits of holy-shit-what-have-we-done with regard to this stupid-big purchase and the baby coming and the changes all of this will mean to my job (and salary), it’s all under control and we’re very happy about it (after the fits pass).  And we have moments like last night when we went to our local grocery store and they played a Frank Turner song we love, or like today at lunch when we walked to the library (it took us four minutes) and found that our Providence library cards work in every library in the state because of course every library in the state is on the same system.  Also, our library has at least four of this year’s six Hugo nominees for best novel actually on the shelf, in the science fiction section (which I didn’t expect to find at all in a tiny town library), meaning they are keeping their collection pretty well up to date.  Yay for me!  And I picked up the new Cat Valente novel from the new releases shelf because I can’t go to the library and not check something out.  Anyway, those moments reinforce that we picked the right place (“It’s a sign.” “You don’t believe in signs.”).

We’re very slowly unpacking (the kitchen is finally a working kitchen again as of last night, although I guess Sunday night to Tuesday night isn’t so bad).  We’ve hired a guy to paint four rooms, and we’re working on scheduling that work, and we’re getting quotes to have someone come out and do some initial yard clean-up (including poison ivy, which we seem to have a lot of).  About three quarters of the outside of the house (first floor) is under attack by bushes and plants and vines of all kinds, and we want some help beating them back.  The poison ivy is all farther from the house, but I want to start killing and removing it as soon as possible.  One place I called says they don’t like to handle poison ivy removal because that can cause their guys to miss work, and I was like, I KNOW, OF COURSE IT’S DIFFICULT, WHY DO YOU THINK I’M WILLING TO PAY YOU TO DO IT.  So we’re probably not going with that guy.  We have a stone wall bordering most of the property that we can barely see through all the overgrown plants, but that’s next year’s problem.  (We have a stone wall!  Of all the things we wanted in a forever home, a stone wall was one we never thought we’d actually get.)

Want to know something REALLY weird?  There’s a CRIB upstairs.  Like, for a BABY to sleep in.  Because we’re going to have a BABY soon.  This kid is going to be 15 years old, and I’m still going to be surprised to see them come in to the kitchen.  I’m adjusting.  Slowly.

(The crib and dresser both got delivered yesterday – BIG thank you to both sets of parents for those and their accessories.  They look FANTASTIC, and they’ll look even better when they’re actually in the baby’s room after it gets painted.)

Things are coming together!

Moving is happening!

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This weekend, we are moving everything from the townhouse to the new house.  Well, everything that requires a truck.  Last week, we moved a bunch of little things, stuff that didn’t need to go in moving boxes and was small enough to fit in the car.  And we cleaned.  Tomorrow, we pick up a truck and we’ll make a trip with all the boxes.  I will do no more than supervise, I promise.  Tom is coming on Sunday, so he and John will move all the furniture then.  As long as the only things left by Sunday night fit in the car, we’ll be in good shape, but I have no doubt that we’ll have EVERYthing moved.  Then we’ll just have to do a quick clean of the townhouse, and we’ll be done there.

DONE.  Done with the ugly bathroom that never feels clean enough.  Done with the super-loud creaky floors and stairs.  Done with the nails popping out of the floor downstairs, hurting feet and ripping socks.  Done with the windows that look directly into our neighbors’ house.  Done with the stuffy, overly warm house that has forced us to flee to Starbucks to work for the last two days.  (I’ve been super-productive, though, so maybe working in Starbucks isn’t a terrible thing.)  We left one of the box fans at the new house, so the first level hasn’t had any way to move air for a week or so, and last night we were eating dinner and watching TV and I was SO HOT.  I was dripping sweat doing absolutely nothing.  John was not as uncomfortable as I was (and he’s usually more sensitive to the heat), so I can only assume baby Hugo was contributing to my issues.  It was not fun.  Also, my feet are swollen by the end of every day, and I HATE it.  That is NOT what my feet are supposed to look like.  Or feel like.  It kind of gives me the creeps.

Anyway, we’re ready to move.

Things are moving along

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We switched practices recently, and even after just one visit with a doctor (met with a nurse last week to get some initial stuff out of the way), I am SO MUCH HAPPIER.  The nurse and the doctor both introduced themselves immediately, something not a SINGLE person in the previous practice did.  It’s such a small thing (and that is certainly not the whole reason we left the other practice), but it’s so nice.  I’ve seen that at other doctors’ offices, too – why do so many medical professionals skip the introduction?  Am I supposed to just assume you’re the doctor or the nurse I made an appointment with?  The nurse at the first practice never got my name right, either, so I was never entirely sure I was in the right place.

This practice is in a new building, and it’s nice, and it’s pretty, and everyone we’ve met has been nice and helpful and cheerful and WHAT A RELIEF!

Emily, Sean, and Graham visited this past weekend, and we spent most of two days driving past potential houses and exploring potential neighborhoods (and also eating our weight in seafood and ice cream and pie, which CERTAINLY showed when the doctor made me get on the scale today).  They swore up and down that they were happy house-hunting with us, but I’m willing to bet there was some regret about spending so much of the weekend in the car when they hit the road for the long trip home Sunday afternoon.  Let’s drive ALL the hours!

Graham is adorable and funny and I’m SO not ready for a toddler.  It’s a good thing that happens gradually.  I spent part of my morning trying to imagine the baby that’s going to fit into the super-cute onesies Emily and Sean bought us in Newport – our first baby things!  It’s the first time I’ve tried to picture this baby as a real baby, and I’m failing miserably.  I’m basically coming up with stock baby photos that don’t look anything like us.  I realize I could probably look at my baby pictures and John’s and get close, but that’s no fun.

Top of the list (for now)

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Last weekend, we drove to East Greenwich, all of 15 minutes south of Providence, and found maybe our perfect town.

  • Good schools
  • Houses we like, in the price range we’re considering
  • A cute Main Street with lots of businesses
  • Houses we like, in the price range we’re considering, that are walkable to cute Main Street
  • Near water*

*The near water part isn’t perfect.  Main Street is a few blocks up from the water, and it doesn’t look there are any public spaces on the water.  There’s a marina, but no park over there or paths or anything.

[Pause for googling]

I stand corrected.  There is a park a little south of downtown, and I forgot about the state park that’s just on the other side of the bay.  So whether the park on the water is walkable from downtown remains to be seen, but at least it’s there.

When I think about things I miss about Eugene, the parks and the paths along the river are high up there.   I really loved the convenience of walking out the door and being in a park, right on the river, within a couple of blocks.  And the 20 miles of paths…but then I remember the gloomy winter, the ultra-dry summer, that John had sinus problems almost the enter 18 months, and the forest fires.  So I’ll keep missing some things about Eugene, but moving was the right decision.

We need some backup towns because when it comes time to look seriously for our next place to live, we might not find what we want in East Greenwich, but we took this weekend off.

Saturday night head explosions

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John and I rent a townhouse in Providence.  Moving to Providence was the next step in figuring out where we want to live, settle, buy a house, and so far, we really like it.  We LOVE our neighborhood.  We’re not in any hurry to buy a house (still, although if we find one we like at a price we’re cool with, we might), and so the plan was to give this townhouse a full year, or at least get through the summer, and decide if we wanted to renew the lease or find another place.

That was the plan until our recent happy news.  Now, we know we have to move when our lease is up.  It would be easy to have an infant here, but once that baby starts to crawl…not so easy.  The entire first floor, with the exception of the entryway and the kitchen, which are both tiled, is old hardwood floor.  The old part is important – it was installed when you still nailed the floorboards down from the top.  So the entire first floor has row upon row upon row of tiny nails that are constantly popping up and ripping socks and hurting our feet.  No kidding – John keeps a hammer in the dining room cabinet.  Hammering down nails in the floor is nearly a daily occurrence.  Yes, we have a big area rug in the living room, but it’s not wall-to-wall carpeting.  A crawling baby on hands and knees on that floor?  I don’t think so.

Also, I think I take back the part where I said it would be easy to have an infant here.

  1. The stairs are twisty and steep.  And slippery.
  2. EVERY FLOORBOARD IN THE ENTIRE HOUSE CREAKS.  LOUDLY.  It is impossible to sneak around in this house.  If one of us is awake and moving, we’re both awake.  If this baby is a light sleeper…
  3. The back door (where we park) is hard to navigate if you have anything in even one hand.  It has stairs, a sharp turn, a railing that makes the space really small, a heavy storm door that opens out and takes up the remaining space, and an inner door that requires two hands to open (one to turn the key, one to turn the knob).  I have issues with it when I’m carrying groceries.  How will I handle that when I’m carrying a carseat with a baby in it?

Sure, none of this is insurmountable, but it’ll be a huge pain, and we can move, so we’re planning to.  Where?  NO IDEA.  I mean, somewhere in New England, but…that doesn’t help all that much.  So to find out, we’re going to drive all over New England most weekends for the next few months and scout.

Last Saturday, we headed to southern New Hampshire, which, to our complete and utter surprise, is only an hour away from us on a Saturday morning (because no traffic around Boston).  We drove around Nashua, Derry, Hooksett, Concord (lunch and a little walking, too), and Henniker.  Nashua and Concord are firmly on our list, and we’ve discovered that we probably don’t want to move to a town smaller than Concord (pop. 42K).  (Of course, that disqualifies all of Vermont except Burlington.  We’ll see.)  We got back home, tired and cranky from our long day in the car, and started talking about Providence.  Why have we essentially written off Providence after one day’s jaunt to New Hampshire?  Well, we haven’t.  We like it.  You know what?  Let’s focus on Providence for a while.  And then we realized one big thing we haven’t discussed AT ALL: schools.  The freakout began.  When we were thinking about kids years ago, it was easy.  We lived in the best (sometimes second best) school district in Virginia.  No thought required.  And while Rhode Island schools on the whole are pretty good, Providence schools SUCK.  Apparently.  Based on a couple of days of frantic research.  Everyone who lives in the neighborhood we want to settle in sends their kids to one of the three private schools nearby.  We are NOT doing that.  We went from “huh, New Hampshire could be it” to “Wait, we really like Providence, let’s just stay here” to “WE CAN’T RAISE OUR KID IN PROVIDENCE SCHOOLS AND OH MY GOD HOW ARE WE GOING TO FIND A PLACE TO LIVE THIS IS TOO HARD UNFAIR UNFAIR UNFAIR UNFAIR!!!!” in the space of two hours Saturday night.

Fun times.  And NO, this was not just me and my hormones.  John was right there with me, although he was more constructive about it.

We’re better today.  The plan for now is to check out the rest of Rhode Island, see what’s out there, see what towns we might like to live in and afford on OH YEAH HALF OF OUR CURRENT INCOME possibly – exactly what I’m going to do for work, both short and long term is still very much TBD.

It’ll be fine.  We’re not obsessed with making sure we live in the best school district ever – our bar for that is pretty reasonable, I think.  It was just such a shock to realize that we had NEVER considered schools in our plans to move around and find our perfect place to live.  We didn’t think we’d have to.

Welcome to the 20th century

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Congratulations are in order!  We are the proud owners of a microwave for the first time in nearly two years.  Nearly three, if you’d like to be pedantic about it.  The last time we had a microwave at our disposal was in the Annapolis apartment.  The Oregon house didn’t come with one, and after a few months without it, it became a matter of principle to get by without buying one.  But now, a year and nine months later, we have abandoned principle.  We have a microwave and the first thing we did with it was reheat tea.  Anticlimactic.  The second thing we did with it was soften butter because I had a lot of baking to do and I forgot to leave the butter out, and softening butter in a saucepan is really more like melting butter which is not the same thing!

I don’t think we’ve used it for anything else.  It’s been a week.

We’re not used to having it.

Feeling at home

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Mom bought me this book called This Is Where You Belong: Finding Home Wherever You Are, and it’s about someone who moves a lot and her attempts to feel at home in those places, either to make the stay more pleasant or to find that place that feels like home so the moving can stop.

I can’t help but feel Mom is trying to tell me something.  🙂

Anyway, early on, the author makes a list of things one should do to be active about feeling at home in the place you are, and as I read down the list, I was able to check off 8 out of the 10 things.

  1. Walk more.
  2. Buy local.
  3. Get to know my neighbors.
  4. Do fun stuff.
  5. Explore nature.
  6. Volunteer.
  7. Eat local.
  8. Become more political.
  9. Create something new.
  10. Stay loyal through hard times.

I did those things in Eugene, and I started many of them the first week we were there.  Those things were not enough to make me feel like Eugene was the place for me.  I did at least half of those things in Annapolis – again, not enough to make me feel like Annapolis was the place.  So either I’m difficult and really picky (possible, but I don’t think I’m that special) or those things aren’t enough.

I think it’s just about time spent in the same place.  We were ready to leave Ashburn for several years before we finally did, but it felt like home.  It still feels like home, sometimes, but it ought to after 10 years.  I don’t think having a place feel like home and feeling like you don’t belong there are mutually exclusive.

I spent most of the book disagreeing with the author and wondering why she was dumbing down the written version of herself.  Maybe it was supposed to make her relatable, but I found it irritating.  Those “insights” are obvious.

At the beginning, she talks about being excited to move to a new place right up until she gets there and then almost immediately feeling like it’s wrong.  I don’t feel that way – I keep the excitement of the new place for quite some time, I think, and I gotta say, I’m feeling pretty good about Providence.  Of course, I felt pretty good about Eugene, too, but I don’t think I ever really thought Eugene was going to be it.  For me, Eugene was always a fun experiment, but I didn’t expect to want to stay there (Eugene, or Oregon, or the west coast in general).  Maybe that’s why I didn’t, at least partially, but I don’t know.

I can understand the author’s urge to write this book, but I haven’t had any sleepless nights worrying about whether I’ll ever find THE PLACE.  I’m confident I can be happy in any place (and I’m certainly not miserable in the places we go or have been), but for now, I’m not ready to settle down.  That does not make me unhappy.

Making progress

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We are down to minimal boxes, guys.  The first floor has zero boxes left.  On the second floor, the only boxes left are the two wardrobe size boxes from our closet.  In the basement, there are a couple of boxes, tools and things we don’t use much, and the third floor has zero boxes!

I was thisclose to suggesting we get rid of every item of clothing we didn’t travel across the country with – that’s all we had to wear for two and a half weeks, and we did fine – but then I remembered that it’s been summer and fall is starting and winter is coming and I’m not in the mood to buy a whole new wardrobe.  Some new clothes, sure, but I can’t handle starting from scratch.  Plus, I like a lot of my fall and winter clothes.

Next step for the house: unpack the rest of the clothes and sort out our closet situation.  We have plenty of closet space, but we’re not sure how to organize it yet.

Step after that: hang stuff on the walls!  We are actually going to hang our stuff up EARLY.  For real.  We totally are.  I’ll show you.  Trust me.

I have a desk!

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I remembered where we put the screws first thing this morning, as we were walking to Starbucks.  They were in the toolbox because OF COURSE they were in the toolbox.  Now I have a desk AND a chair and they’re both set up in my brand new office with lots of windows that would be letting in all the sunlight if we weren’t in the middle of a rainy day.

Also, the pod is gone, our own washer and dryer are hooked up, and now we just have to figure out how to arrange the rooms.  Also also, I still have to work full-time.  Where’s my lottery jackpot?

I’m sitting in a chair!

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Our container was delivered today!  And five hours later, it was empty, and our house was full.  We have chairs and shelves and dishes and a couch and a TV and OH OUR BED HALLELUJAH, but you know what I don’t have yet?  A desk.  I have a chair and a table top and I have four legs for the table, but we can’t find the ziploc bag that has all the screws to connect the legs to the table.  We both remember putting them all in one bag (all the screws for both of our desks are together), and I remember taking it from John, and I think I remember making him look at where I was packing it, but neither of us remembers where that was.  We’ve opened every kitchen box and most of the living room boxes.  We’ve searched the car and we’ve searched the suitcases we packed in the car.  Hopefully it will turn up soon.

In the meantime, now that we have chairs, I can at least work with my laptop on my lap.  Which is how I’m typing right now.  It’s SUCH a nice change to have chairs.

A Typical Day

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Cross-country moves really screw with your daily routine.  Before we left Oregon, here’s what my day usually looked like:

5:45am: Alarm

6am: At my desk, 9am (eastern) meeting started.

6am – 9am: Work.  Coffee and toast around 7am.

9am – 10am(ish): Run in the park.  Maybe.  If not in this hour, then it happens after work.

10am(ish) – 2pm(ish): Work.

2pm(ish) – 6pm(ish): Run, if it didn’t happen at 9am.  Maybe a riding lesson.  Errands.  Read.  Your standard after-work stuff.

6pm(ish) – 9pm(ish): Dinner, TV, clean-up, shower.

9pm(ish): Bedtime.

Repeat.

Then we started the cross-country drive.  Over 6 days, we developed a pretty good routine.

7am: Get up and work out, if the hotel has a gym. Shower. Check out.

9am: Hit the road.  Breakfast and coffee somewhere.

9am to 2pm(ish): Drive drive drive.  Usually John took the morning shift.  Maybe lunch.

2pm(ish): Switch drivers.

2pm(ish) to 7pm(ish): Drive drive drive.  Usually I took the afternoons and evenings.  John got sleepy.

6 or 7pm: We figure out where we’re stopping for the night and John books us a hotel room.

7pm or 8pm: Check in to hotel, find dinner.

9pm or 10pm: Crash hard.

Repeat.

We knew exactly what had to come out of the car each night, and we knew exactly how to put everything back in the car each morning.  We listened to audiobooks (the first Ellis Peters monk detective book (good enough, but MAN it was slow-going), two MC Beaton Hamish Macbeth books – I love Hamish Macbeth), podcasts (mostly Hello from the Magic Tavern), and music (Sirius XM’s Pop Rock channel is good, and for Labor Day weekend, they had a road trip channel that was fun), and mostly stayed off the internet because we had basically zero reception nearly the whole way.

Then we got to Providence and moved in to our empty house.  Since hardwood floors are not a comfortable place for sitting and I still have to work, we’ve had to develop a new routine.

7am(ish): Get up.  Run.  Breakfast at home (cereal – we did some basic shopping).

9am(ish): Arrive at the office, otherwise known as the Starbucks about five blocks away, to work where we can have internet, tables, and chairs.

9am(ish) to noon(ish): When I can work quietly, I work inside where there are outlets.  When I have to talk during a conference call, I pop outside, where I can speak loudly enough to be heard (and also where I mute for passing traffic).  Then back inside.  If I have a call with clients, I head back to the house to avoid the background noise.

Noon(ish) to 1pm(ish): Back home for lunch (sandwiches).

1pm(ish) to 5pm(ish): Same as the morning, back at Starbucks because chairs are a wonderful thing.

5pm(ish) to 9pm(ish): Clean the house or run errands or take a long walk (one afternoon we drove to Narragansett to find a beach) or otherwise kill time outside of the house, find dinner, bed.

Repeat.

And it is a routine – we’ve been doing approximately this for a week now.  The baristas at Starbucks recognize us, and a number of the regulars recognize us, too.  Oh, the regulars.  I don’t mean regulars in the sense of people who always go to the same place at the same time every day and order the same thing.  I mean the people who come to this Starbucks every day to work.  Like, every day.  And they stay all day.  I mean, it’s exactly what we’re doing, but we’re only doing this until our furniture gets here.  These people have been doing this for years.  One guy brings a power strip to get past the limited number of outlets and has been nice enough to let us use it.  So, you know, we’re making friends, but I’m not going to be too sad when I can go back to something resembling my Oregon routine again.

Somewhat less stressed, but still furniture-less

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UPDATE: During our first phone call with PODS this morning (after an hour on hold), we found out that the company didn’t know where our container was.  They were going to find out and get back to us in an hour.  Two hours later, after no update, I called back.  After nearly another hour, I got the person who could actually tell us what was going.  While I was on the phone, NOT ON HOLD, she contacted someone in Logistics who called the truck driver and asked when they were arriving.  The truck with our container on it will arrive at the storage facility tomorrow.  Since they don’t know what time yet, they can’t schedule the delivery for tomorrow, and since we’re going out of town for the weekend, we can’t get our stuff until we get back.  BUT.  The delivery has been scheduled for Tuesday.

So the mystery of our missing stuff has been resolved, although not entirely because I was so relieved to get some answers that I didn’t ask all of the questions.  Why is it late in the first place?  Where is it right now?  Why are ALL OF YOUR SYSTEMS CENTRALLY MANAGED WHEN YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE A NATIONAL COMPANY?  I wouldn’t have asked the last question since the woman I spoke to is in customer service and not responsible for that part, but still.  I would like to know.

Disaster recovery systems are important

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The cloud is not really in the cloud.*  I mean, I knew that – the cloud is really just a server farm (or several server farms) and thus entirely physical and subject to disasters like hurricanes and I’m mentioning this because we’re using PODS to move our stuff across the country and they’re based in Clearwater, FL, and apparently they got destroyed by the hurricane because their phone lines and EVEN THEIR WEBSITE have been completely down since Saturday.  (That run-on sentence was sponsored by my fear that our truck will not arrive tomorrow and we’ll be living on the floor for another week.)  Based on the phone message I heard on Monday, they had deliberately shut down the customer service center Friday to Monday to keep their employees at home, which makes sense.  I can understand and appreciate that.  But they said they’d be back up Tuesday.  They were not.  They still are not, and now it’s Wednesday.  I can’t get a live person, which, again, I can understand considering they’re probably literally underwater, but for the website to still be down?  I can’t log in to my account to see the status of my shipment.  I scheduled it to arrive tomorrow (Thursday, earliest day possible).  Is it still coming tomorrow?  I can’t check.  I can’t call anyone to check.  Local PODS storage facilities don’t have local numbers.  All numbers route to FL, where there are only unhelpful recordings and hang-ups, and all web URLs route to the Hurricane Irma page they put up.

UPDATE!  All of the above was written earlier today, when I had been trying to contact PODS for three days.  This evening, I checked again and the website was back up!  With a message saying their phone center is open again!  And that they’d be prioritizing existing customers!  Unfortunately, I didn’t see that until after their call center was closed for the day, but I logged in to our account (yay!) to find no new information (boo).  It says our POD is due to arrive at the local storage center before 9/13.  That’s today.  Did it arrive?  That step doesn’t say it was completed, but is that because there’s a backlog and they haven’t updated the system or did it really not arrive?  It also says they’re going to deliver the POD to our house on the 14th.  That would be tomorrow.  Will it happen?  I can’t say.  The night before they delivered it to us in Eugene, we got a phone call, and email, and an update on our account online giving us a three-hour delivery window.  I have not gotten any of those alerts, and it’s nearly 10pm.

It’s all a mystery that I hope will get resolved tomorrow.  More to come.

*If the computing cloud were actually in the real clouds, this hurricane would have REALLY messed with their systems.

Made it!

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We’re here, in our new home, and the massive drive is over. That is a relief (even though it was fun and I didn’t have to work much and we had no responsibilities and we were seeing things we’ve never seen before and where was I going with this?), but the celebration will have to wait until the cleaning is done.  The big rooms are all okay (bedrooms, living room, dining room), but the other rooms are gross. Both bathrooms are grimy and the kitchen is grimy and greasy. Every surface in the kitchen, including drawers and cabinets, is greasy and vaguely yellow. The crew that was in here painting when we saw the place a month ago cleaned up after themselves, but no one cleaned up after the previous tenant.

Wednesday night, we got in after dark, did a quick tour and unloaded the car, walked to dinner, and dropped by CVS for some cleaning stuff. Then we spent the next two hours on the bathrooms so we could shower before sleeping.  Today (Thursday), I worked most of the day, and John spent the afternoon de-griming the kitchen. New appliances, but it looks like the previous tenant spent his three years deep-frying everything he ate.  When I finished working, we headed to the nearest Target (in Seekonk, which in my head sounds an awful lot like a donkey’s heeHAW) to buy the stuff CVS doesn’t carry, like a mop, a bucket, a broom, and some heavier duty cleaning stuff.

At least the house is empty. This would be a whole lot harder with our stuff in it.  And the weather is lovely!  It’s not all bad.

Too many nights in hotels

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Speaking of hotel oddities, there was this gem in the hotel in Wisconsin.

Too bad for the people in room 121.  Our room in Erie, PA is quite nice, although the bathroom door doesn’t close all the way. There’s always something. We’re in the type of hotel I stayed in the night I walked into a dresser and tore my toenail off (three years ago in Philadelphia) so I’m going to be extra careful when I get up in the middle of the night. My toenail has STILL not fully recovered.

Hotel oddities

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We had two hotels in a row with soft water, which I HATE.  For two days, I felt like I was covered in soap that would never rinse off.  John’s parents’ house has soft water, but it’s never this bad.  Makes my skin crawl.

Oddly, both of those hotels had weird gym situations, too.  The one in Montana advertised a gym, but when we asked at the front desk, the guy said they have an agreement with a gym downtown.  When we’re ready to go, he can give us a key and direct us there.  It’s like 5 miles away.  We didn’t go.  The next night, in Minnesota, there was a gym in the building, but our room keys wouldn’t give us access.  We had to go get special keys made for access to the gym.  Why would you set up a gym for your guests and then not give them automatic access to it?  At least they had one, and once we could get in, it was nicer than the one in Bend – this one had a window.  And water.  And an A/C unit and a fan.  The one in Bend was like a cave.  A hot, sweaty cave with no windows, no water, and no fan.  Turns out I have expectations for a hotel gym.

I carried a watermelon

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We found a magic hotel in Minnesota.  We watched the very end of Dirty Dancing AND THEN IT STARTED OVER AGAIN.  Heaven.  I may never leave.  Also, it’s late, I’m tired, and I may be a little giddy.  Sitting on my butt in the car all day is exhausting work.

Nobody puts Baby in the corner.

Whoops, that was last night.  We left.  Spending tonight in Racine, Wisconsin.  Ooh!  Maybe A League Of Their Own will be on!

Movin’ right along

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For those of you following along at home, Thursday night we drove from Eugene to Bend, OR.  Not terribly far, but we got a late start.  Friday, we drove from Bend to Pocatello, ID, a town I’d never heard of before picking it off the atlas page as a likely place to spend the night.  Saturday, which I think was yesterday (and figuring out what day it is is part of why I’m writing this down right now), we left Pocatello and headed north to Montana, clipping the very western edge of Yellowstone National Park along the way, which was REALLY neat.  I’m not a camper, so I never put seeing that kind of national park very high on my list of things I was likely to see.  Ever.  Happening upon it while trying to do something else was a nice surprise.

I suppose we could have put something more inspiring behind us, but it seems I didn’t take any pictures of the more spectacular views we drove by.  Short-sighted on my part.

Anyway, we found the mountainous pretty part of Montana first (which is how it always looks in our heads), but then we kept driving east and it got flatter and more desert-y.  It does indeed have a big sky, but the sky would have been bigger without the smoke haze.  Blue sky straight up, haze on every horizon.  Oh, well.  We’ll keep plugging east until we can get past all the fires.

A little friend

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Updated with Instagram link.

When we moved to Oregon, Will and Christina gave us a keychain with a little 10th Doctor. Now that we’re leaving, Li’l DT is sharing our adventures.  In a fun twist, he has become OUR companion.

Most of the fun is happening in real time on my Instagram feed (which anyone can see online, without an account, by looking up zannah42 on Instagram.com), but I’ll probably compile the pictures here once we get there.

Here, I’ll make it easy for you.  Go here.  You’ll see the captions (because I always include captions) if you click on an individual picture.

Road Trip Day 1 – The Flames

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When we left Eugene, the road ahead looked like this.

Not too much later (remember, we only drove for about two and half hours the first night), we could see smoke over the mountains in the distance.

Okay, so that one is not very much in the distance.  We’d heard there might be road closures due to forest fires, but we didn’t expect to see this, right from the road.

 

The traffic merged to one lane and there were fire trucks and firefighters and it was all very exciting and SO TOTALLY WEIRD.  All of my other pictures are big blurry messes, but there were individual trees burning like torches.  It’s one thing to know it happens and another to drive alongside.

Today (Day 2, or full Day 1) was uneventful.  Plenty of smoke haze on the horizon across the rest of Oregon and into Idaho, but no visible fires.  We may be taking a slightly more southerly route across Montana to stay on the interstate and get away from the smoke faster.  We’d like to drive away from the scratchy throats, please.