In the meantime, I’m thinking of using the blog space to chat about our efforts to be more eco-friendly. Here’s a new blog that’s just launching that looks very interesting to me. Can’t wait to see what they post in the next few weeks – http://simpleorganic.net/

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.