Where the %#$@ Have I Been?

OK so it’s been a very long time since my last blog here and I’m truly sorry (mostly to myself) for the long hiatus. In my defense, a couple of big things have happened since I last posted. 

You may recall that I wrote a piece last year about our real estate saga and chronicled our efforts to hunt down the ever elusive affordable vacation home. Well our hard work finally paid off during a cold, snowy trip to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho in January. 

I flew up and again looked at approximately 50 houses over a 4 day period. I again weeded out approximately 48 of those houses as crap. Of the two remaining, one met all of the criteria we were looking for – affordable, nicely appointed, attached waterfront (in this case a deeded boat slip at the community marina), water view, and did I mention affordable? The unicorn property was located and the unicorn was slain. Victory!

I spent the next few months spent figuring out how to pay for the new place and how to get furniture into it. I sold my beloved Porsche 911 (an obituary/blog about this will be forthcoming) so we would have more free cash available, and we shopped and we shopped and we shopped. We were determined not to buy cheap crap like we did on our first vacation home back in the mid 2000s, so more time and effort was put into buying the right things rather than just anything. We filled up the space where the Porsche used to live and then had to figure out how to get all this stuff from Tucson to Idaho.

I’ve had numerous U Haul adventures in moving over the years and the last one had just about worn off, so I decided to rent the biggest trailer they had, fill it and the back of our pickup truck up with all the new furnishings, and make a kamikaze trip to the new place in early April. Ten days and 3,500 miles later, I was back home in Tucson and the stuff was in Idaho waiting for us to come up for the summer.

Now that the all-consuming vacation home saga was finally behind us, we decided to splurge on a trip of a lifetime to Europe – big thing number two.

We have done active travel with various touring companies in the past and a bike tour combined with a cruise on the Rhine River caught our eye. We committed to a mid June departure and it was to be a celebration of my 50th birthday, our 20th wedding anniversary and my wife’s cutting back to part time work. We figured with all those milestones we should celebrate with a big adventure.

It was an amazing trip. We flew first class to Paris where we spent a few days getting re-acquainted with the city. We then took a train to Basel, Switzerland where we joined up with the Backroads tour and our Ama Waterways river ship. We spent the next 8 days days cycling through the country roads and bike paths of France, Germany and the Netherlands and on our beautiful boat, sailing through central Europe. We finished off the trip with a couple more days in Amsterdam, then trained back to Paris and flew home. It was a great adventure that we will always remember.

After returning home, I had just a few days to get ready for big thing number three – the entire summer at our new place in Idaho. I packed up my clothes, our toys (bikes, golf clubs, water skis, etc.), and our dogs for yet another long solo drive trip from Tucson to Coeur d’Alene. Ruth joined me two weeks later and is spending the majority of her summer at the lake with the exception of a few short trips back to Tucson to work some ER shifts.

I’m sitting at my kitchen table looking out at Lake Coeur d’Alene as I write this and it still hasn’t completely sunk in that we actually have this place and can live this life. Eight months in the desert and four months at the lake seem to be as close to endless summer as we can get and we plan on enjoying every minute of it.

So that should catch everyone up on the happenings since last I posted. I will return to my semi-regular musings, stories, and rants and try to be a better, more consistent blogger. Happy reading.