Purcells on Wheels

I think the South is taking its final revenge on me for hating it so.  Jacksonville, and now Charleston, are both hotter than Orlando has been.  The humidity is just unbelievable.  The kids are covered in mosquito bites, and they’ve barely been outside.  I managed to find the fire ant mound right outside our door, by standing in it.  But the best part is – our A/C quit some time yesterday while we were out, now its sweltering inside and out.  Oh, and the spot we’re in doesn’t have sewer, so we can’t take a lot of showers to cool off.  You’d think that’s enough, wouldn’t you?  But wait, we’re here to visit our friend, Marie.  Turns out her upstairs A/C is dead, and the downstairs unit is almost dead.  Good times…

After an excruciatingly long wait, the house finally sold about 3 weeks before school finished.  We moved back into the RV, and waited for school to end.  At the beginning of the 3 weeks, it seemed like forever, and I thought I might burn out before we even left town.  Fortunately, moving back into the rig wasn’t as bad as I feared.  I guess because I knew what to expect, and I’m so happy to be free of the house.  Sean and I both had lots of things we planned to get done while we twiddled our thumbs for 3 weeks.  Its probably no surprise that we got very little of it done.

School ended yesterday.  Last night we had one last get together with a couple of the neighbors.  Caitlin had one last sleepover with her best friend.  We went back to the neighborhood this morning to pick her up, and play for a bit.  After that we left the neighborhood for the very last time.  I almost shed a tear.

It still doesn’t feel like we’re gone forever though.  We didn’t get home last night until after 1230am, so I was too tired today to care about it too much.  We only went to Jacksonville, so we aren’t even out of the state yet.  Maybe tomorrow it will feel different, when we cross the state line.  We stopped in Jax to visit one of our friends, and to go to a giant used book store.  It was a very successful trip.  I have a big list of kids’ books that I’ve been on the lookout for, and found a lot of them.  It was great fun.

So tomorrow its on to Charleston for a few days to visit another friend, then up to Virginia.

Oh, we did learn an important lesson sitting around in Orlando.  We have the worms with us because they were doing so well, I didn’t want to just ditch them.  So, they go in the shower on travel days.  Its the only place where we can be sure they won’t tip over on bumpy rides.  When we’re stopped, they hang out outside.  After being out for almost a week, they got totally invaded by fire ants.  We had no idea how to get them out.  We started by cutting off their escape route with bowls of water around the legs.  We tried just brushing them off as they crawled around the outside, but there were SO many of them!  Several days later we decided to dump the whole thing out and see if we could scoop most of them out.  The day before there had still been tons of ants, when we dumped it, we found about 20.  I have no idea what happened to them, but the worms are great, and now we have no ants.

We’ve been thinking about vermiculture (raising earthworms), and vermicomposting for a long time now, but hadn’t planned to do anything about it until we get settled somewhere.  Some of the benefits are having a great way to get rid of kitchen scraps without throwing them in the trash or down the garbage disposal.  They also eat newspaper, cardboard, junk mail, cotton fabric, etc.  Not meat or dairy or oily stuff.  The poo makes excellent fertilizer, and they produce a liquid called Worm Tea that acts as pesticide/fungicide that you can spray on your plants.  Well, we happened across a vendor at a garden festival recently who was selling these easy peasy kits to get started with this.  We couldn’t resist so we got one.  I think we’ll be able to keep it in the RV while we travel.

This is how it came.  The box on top is full of baby worms, the bag has a volcanic rock dust mix that they need to digest their food since they have no teeth.

This is what it looked like when we opened it.  An instruction book, legs for the unit, and the brown thing is a block of coir fiber which is the bedding.  I was disappointed to see all the plastic packaging in such an environmentally friendly product.  The instruction book was wrapped in plastic, and stuck into another plastic bag holding the legs.  And the blue plastic binding strips.  The bins themselves are made from recycled car battery casings.

The cardboard on the outside  is necessary on the inside, it keeps the bedding from running out the bottom while its wet, and provides more food since they’ll eat it.  The block is soaking in water to expand.

It ended up filling the whole bucket, and was more than we needed.

And here go the worms.

Its hard to see even in the full size photo, but there are dozens of worms wriggling away in here.

Just about done, this is the food layer.  There are holes in the bottom of each pan, that they crawl back and forth through.  Last thing will be to lay some damp newspaper on top, and put the cover on.  I’ll check the food every few days to see how fast they’re eating.   It will take about 2-3 months to get to the point where we harvest the castings (poop layer), then about every month after that.  Supposedly from our 1000 baby worms, they’ll grow to over 20,000 in about a year.  So, here we go, we’ll see how easy, or not, it is to keep worms.

We are still waiting. There have been several showings of the house, but no offers yet. At least the weather isn’t unbearably hot right now, we’ve had some pretty nice days lately.

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/

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.