Purcells on Wheels

Enough people have finally told me that I need to finish up the blog, so here goes.  We are back in Orlando.  It was REALLY nice to stop moving, stop having to find a new place to stay, stop planning what to do when we got there, etc.  We got extremely tired of always being tourists.   The funny thing is, now that we’ve been back for awhile, I’m itching to go see more new places.  I think we just need to do it in moderation, an entire year was too long.  Boy, did we see some incredible stuff in our travels though.  Now its really nice to be able to go back and look through the photos without being depressed about living in the tiny trailer.

We got back mid-August, spruced up the house a bit, put it on the market, and now we are just waiting.  And waiting.  We’ve lowered the price a couple of times, but this is a TERRIBLE time to be selling in Orlando.  I think we have one of the worst markets in the country.   Nothing has sold in our neighborhood for a year now.   The good news is we have some wonderful neighbors who make it bearable to live here.  And, the kids both absolutely LOVE going to school!  I was pretty sure Caitlin would, since she’s such a social girl, but I am a little bit happily surprised at how well Ian is doing.   He’s in the regular 2nd grade classroom most of the day, while spending some time in the autistic class to work on social skills.  I love his teacher in that class, she’s wonderful.  So, the kids are gone for 6 hours a day, while Sean and I are both home.  Believe me, I do appreciate how extremely lucky we are to be able to do this.  Its not going to last forever though, we do need to start bringing in some income.  We’ve hesitated to get ‘real’ jobs, because we don’t want to sell the house and just have to quit them.  We might rethink that a little bit though, since I don’t believe the house is going to sell any time soon.  The stuff that is selling around town is far below our price bracket.  Quite the quandry…

We did not end up going to New England in the fall.  When it came time to plan it, we found we were both still so tired of planning trip stuff, we just stayed here.  We went to the Hard Rock Hotel for a few nights while my mom stayed with the kids.  It was pretty nice, we didn’t do much of anything except relax.

Ideally, we’ll sell the house sometime in the spring, wait for the school year to end, then get back in the RV and toodle around New England this summer.  I can’t rule it out until we’ve been there.  But, I do have deep reservations about living there.  I’ve talked to many people who say the cold is just too penetrating/bone deep, and windy for so long.  And others have warned me that while the people are not unfriendly exactly, there is a bit of stigma if you are from ‘away’, rather than born and raised up there.  Personally, I’m still leaning toward Colorado or Bozeman, Montana.

I’m not posting any more pictures here until we get on the road for more than a week.  (We are considering getting an RV with more slides/room, but there isn’t any rush since we’re stuck here for now).   I’m working on uploading more to Flickr, http://www.flickr.com/photos/leomom/    The best way to view them is to look in the separate albums listed on the right.  If there are no people in the picture,  anyone can see them, if there are people, you have to be one of my friends on Flickr to see them.  Flickr is such a public site, and I don’t care to show the whole world pictures of my kids.  I don’t think I get that much traffic on this blog, so I didn’t worry about it here.

Well, I think that’s about it for now.  We’re just trying to figure out what we want to do to make money while we wait for the house to sell.

It has come to my attention that I am very behind on the blog. I love to add the pertinent pictures to my posts, but I’ve fallen so far behind on editing pics, that I haven’t bothered with the blog for a few weeks. So here’s the update in a nutshell – we are currently in Kansas, busting our butts back to Orlando, to arrive by Sunday, Aug 16th. After giving the kids’ their choice, both have decided to try traditional school, as opposed to homeschool. I think this is the right time to let them at least try it, and see what happens. For Ian, this means restarting his IEP, getting retested to see what type of classroom setting they think will work best with him, and see if we agree to that assessment (due to autism, for those who don’t know). He’s such a different person than when he left the public school system, it will be interesting to see what they come up with now. We get back a week before school starts, I kind of doubt we’ll have the answer before school starts, he may be starting late. Wow, what would it be like to have both kids in school, and Sean and I have 6 hours a day free?? If either of them is unhappy, or I can’t deal with the red tape BS of public school, we’ll pull them right back out and go back to homeschool.

Continuing the nutshell, after Spokane, we went down to Bozeman, Montana, and LOVED it! It was gorgeous, a cute little town, and seemed like it had stores on the main drag to draw locals, not just tourists, which was nice. In the end though, I’m afraid it might be too small. I’m thinking of very social Caitlin, and the people who mentioned that in small towns, you’re kind of stuck with the people who are there, you have to make friendships work, even if you don’t like the people that much. And Ian, who I would like to be able to know other autistic kids, in addition to typical kids. These things lead me to gravitate toward the outskirts of larger towns/cities. Much as I loved Kalispell/Bozeman/Glacier National Park, I think those places are too remote from bigger cites.

We’ve just spent 5 days in Colorado Springs, and loved it. We need to go back to Orlando, and work on getting the house sold. I don’t think there is a whole lot we can do, other than replace the dead grass (don’t get me started) and get the carpets cleaned. While we are waiting, Sean and I plan to take a trip by ourselves to New Hampshire/Vermont in October. We still want to see at least that much of New England before we make a final decision. Other than those two states, our top picks are Colorado, Washington, and Oregon. We need to do some tax comparisons before we make a final decision. I would really, really love to have a state picked before we sell our house. Unfortunately, I think we’ll have plenty of time to arrive at a decision. The good news is, I know we can find places in each of the states I mentioned, that will make us happy.

I really will work on getting pics up reasonably soon. I’m just too anal about that, I like them to be perfect, and I like to process them in order, I’ll try to get over that…lol.

We didn’t actually stay here, but made a day trip from Spokane.  It was a gorgeous place.  Certainly bustling on a perfect summer day.  We were dumb and didn’t think to bring the kids’ bathing suits, but they still managed to have some fun in water.  We went for an airplane ride in a little sea plane, which the kids got a big kick out of.  I managed not to get sick, which is always good.

After Wilbur, we headed over to Spokane.  My mom came out and stayed in a cabin at our campground, which was ultra-convenient.  She didn’t need to rent a car, and the kids spent almost every night at her place.  It was a very nice change to be able to enjoy our coffee with peace and quiet in the mornings.

We stayed fairly busy here.  We went to see fireworks at a nearby town, Deer Park.  The guy in the office of our campground said they put on a really cool display every year.  We couldn’t find any info about exactly where, or what time, so we ended up getting there about 8pm.  Turns out fireworks weren’t until 10pm, so we had some time to kill.  The kids were pretty good about it.  We were at the high school, on the track field.  Ian ended up walking/running an entire mile, while Caitlin did half.  They also practiced summersaults which is always funny to watch.   The fireworks were cool, but only lasted a little over 10 minutes.  I’m guessing with the economy woes, they had to downsize this year.  I talked to someone else later who was also there, who said her 9 year old daughter was really ticked off because last year was so much better.  I was okay with it, my kids were tired.  I got to practice fireworks photos, which was fun.  One nice thing about going back to Orlando, is that I know where I can see Sea World’s fireworks without going into the park, so I can practice some more.

We did a good bit of driving around, and found a lot of really pretty properties right outside the city.  This could be a possibility for us.

One of the funnest things we did was go to a U-pick strawberry farm.  Oh my gosh!  I have never done this before, and these were the BEST strawberries I’ve ever had!  They let you eat as many as you want while picking, which is smart, because we ended up buying a lot more than we planned.  They did start to get mushy by the end of the day though, so we froze a bunch for smoothies.

We went to lunch with a friend’s brother and his wife while we were there, and it was really neat.  Their office is on the penthouse floor of one of the historic buildings downtown, with quite an interesting history.  We got fantastic views of the city, and had a great time chatting about life in Spokane.

I’ve fallen behind, because I’m losing interest in keeping up the blog.  Not just that, but the whole trip in general, really.  Which makes me mad because we’re finally at the best part.  But its just too much traveling, for too long a time.  I’m sick to death of being the tourist, always trying to figure out where we should go, what we should see, and always on the go.  I know there is so much interesting stuff everywhere, but I’ve gotten to the point that I just don’t care about most of it anymore.  I’m also finding it harder and harder to keep up with school with Ian.  Its too hard to have a routine and get it done while we’re traveling.

We went to Wilbur planning to workkamp for a month.  This is where you work a certain number of hours per week in exchange for a free site.  We are still toying with the idea of owning an RV park, and wanted to get a little experience at running one.  Plans changed somewhat and we were only able to stay 1 week.  But, that was long enough to figure out some towns are just too small.  Its much different staying home and doing nothing because its what you choose to do, rather than because there just ISN’T anything to do for many miles around.

The big news is that for many reasons, we are cutting the trip short.  We plan to be back in Florida sometime in mid-September.  We’ll continue through Washington to Montana, and down to Colorado for a bit, then head back to the humid hell.  At this point, I don’t know what we’re going to do about seeing the Northeast.  It seems too much of a shame to skip it altogether, but the idea of getting back in the RV for another extended trip is so repugnant to me.  It depends too somewhat on what time of year our house sells.   We’ll see.

Wenatchee is also a city that popped up on places to live quizzes, and we’d seen it written up on some of those ‘best places to live’ lists.  It was on our way east so we decided to check it out.  I’m really glad we only stayed 2 nights, because it took us about 20 minutes to rule it out.  Its supposed to have great quality of life, but I think that’s just according to the city PR department.  It was a little shabby, more than a little in some places.  The countryside was brown, not very pretty.  We stayed in a state park again, which was very nice.  Washington has some really great state/county/city parks.

On our full day there, we went to Leavenworth, which is a little mountain tourist town modeled to look Bavarian.  It was actually pretty neat, we liked it a lot.

We stopped by Seattle for a few days to visit a couple of Sean’s friends, which was a nice change, and to take the kids to the Space Needle.  Once again, the big city nearly drove me batty.  I just can’t take the crowded downtown areas.  The Needle was cool though, and both kids liked it.  We stayed at a nice campground, our site was right near the playground, which was great.  Nice paved streets for bike riding, and a hiking trail that was actually a little strenous in places.  We also went to Pike Place Market, which was a madhouse.  The original Starbucks is there, so we broke our No National Chains rule and got a cup of coffee.  We loved all the green color, and all of the spruce and fir trees.  Very pretty.  The rain wasn’t bad at all, misty a few times, cloudy part of the day, sunny the other part.

We had heard Bellingham is a nice place to live, and it popped up on a few of those ‘where should you live’ quizzes we’ve taken.  We took the rig on a ferry ride to Whidby Island,  then drove the rest of the way to Bellingham.  We stayed a week to check it out a bit.  We did like it, it seemed easy enough to get around, big enough to have all the stores you need, had a nice park that we went to a few times.  Fairhaven District is a historic downtown area that was really nice.  Although if you’re a local, I don’t think you’d need to go very often.  They did have a nice village green area, where we went to a local farmer’s market.  They also have a bookstore that loves dogs.  Sophie didn’t like it because there were people in it too.  We toodled around one of the ritzy neighborhoods and saw some gorgeous houses.  Overall though, it wasn’t that exciting.  It just didn’t have the same appeal as Port Townsend or Astoria.

We stayed a week in Port Townsend, and loved it.  We were in Fort Worden State Park, which overlooks Puget Sound.  We had the best site in the park, right next to the beach.  It was pretty windy though.  By the end of the week, we’d had enough wind.  We played along the beach a lot.  Low tide was great fun, lots of exposed rocks and tidepools.  We saw a pair of bald eagles, and a family of sea otters out hunting in the kelp.  The town itself was nice, not quite as closely packed in as Astoria.  Downtown was quaint, we had some yummy, local pizza.  They have a great farmer’s market twice a week, and a really cool local co-op grocery store in town.

We scouted around for some houses/land.  There is plenty for sale, but pretty pricey in town.  We found a great lot, actually 8 adjacent lots for sale, totaling about an acre.  But, it was 200K just for the property, I’d rather find something a little less expensive.  It was a nice neighborhood though, woodsy and private, but lots of neighbors around.

We went into Olympic National Park one day.  It was beautiful, but I hate that dogs can’t go anywhere except the parking lots in most national parks.  We went to Hurricane Ridge and saw rain/snow moving in on the neighboring mountaintops, it was really cool.  The deer are really tame, Caitlin was almost close enough to touch one that grazed right up to the trail.

I think Port Townsend is at the top of the list of places we like.

We spent a week here too.  We wanted to move closer to Mount St Helens so we could see it in a day trip and leave Sophie in the RV.  She couldn’t go anywhere around the Visitor’s Center or on any trails.

We stayed at a campground right on the Columbia River, and watched lots of big ships going back and forth from Portland.  It was really cool.

One day we took a Scenic Drive and saw a few waterfalls, and did some geocaching.  We stopped at Vista House, which overlooks the Gorge.  What a beautiful view!  Multnomah Falls is the popular one.  I first saw it on one of those art doors back in Grants Pass, then people told me we had to go see it.  It was really beautiful, but pretty crowded.  You can see it from I-5, and there is a rest area where highway travelers can stop and access it.  The kids loved it, they got squished pennies and ice cream.

Mount St Helens was really cool.  It was a pretty drive through a bunch of forests owned by Weyerhauser.  It was neat seeing signs for when they planted and when they plan to harvest.  I think they let the trees grow for about 45 years.  Talk about long term planning.  Anyway, it was so interesting to see where the vegetation changed so much after the eruption.  Its still looks very different almost 30 years later.  Right near the mountain it still looks deserty and surreal. I’m waiting for free internet access again to upload a bunch of pictures to Flickr.

I took the photo of the Noble Firs because they looked so neat.  With the branch structure, it looks like the whole scene is composed of layers that don’t quite match up.