The Grand Finale

This will be our last blog post (or, at least until we decide to become homeless and have a once in a lifetime opportunity to travel for a month across the country). First things first - the good news. Robbie was offered a job today! He will be teaching 4th grade right here in town. He starts work in about three weeks, and Jenny doesn't start until late September so I suppose the vacation will continue.

Our house is shaping up to be fantastic. You can actually see the floor in the living room now, and the laundry pile is shrinking. Our desks are set up (which is where I am comfortably blogging right now), and we were even able to hook up Mr. Tivo to watch some shows with dinner that he had stored for us from June (we are getting cable tomorrow). Basically..the blog would be boring if it were to continue because it would involve things like, "Robbie did some laundry today. Jenny made some lasagna." I guess it's kind of cool to be boring again. Anyway, We had fun moving in the rest of our furniture (the dresser had a slight mishap yesterday, and it had to spend the night in our landlords' garage after he was kind enough to glue and nail the leg back on), and Robbie really did do some laundry and Jenny really did make a lasagna to celebrate the new job.

On a sidenote, isn't it scary to move to a new place with no knowledge of the shower situation? I mean, you can see the shower, and even turn on the shower, but you never know if it will be a GOOD shower until you can actually take a shower in it. Our shower is tiny, a 2'x 2' little box. It's a little claustrophobic because the door reaches up to about one inch from the ceiling, and you kind of bump your elbows when you reach up to wash your hair..but the water pressure is so amazing that it's almost painful. Trust me, that's a good thing.

We have a little list of things we need to get, so maybe we will emerge from the apartment tomorrow to go to the store. Otherwise, we are pretty content spending time getting settled.

We spent some time looking back through the blog, and it's amazing to think of all of the things we have seen over the past month. We left Tampa on July 1st, excited and not knowing what to expect. We were kind of "winging it", but it just goes to show you that even when "winging it" things such as jobs and homes tend to work out. We had so much fun, and it's really inspired us to travel more...although, not for a little while. Our cars and our backs need some time to recover.

We would like to take this opportunity to send a little thank you to our cars, Kirby and Kit, to our friend Ashley for taking care of Kirby and Mr. Plant, to Eureka for making our amazing tent (the Eureka Sunrise 8x8..we totally recommend it), to our sleeping bags for keeping us warm, to everyone who let us stay with them/mooch off of them, and to everybody for following our blog. We had lots of fun with it, and we can always look back to remember everything we saw and to remember the funny things that happened.

Time for a little recap!
Day #1 (7/1): 443 Miles driven. Tampa, FL to Milton, FL near Pensacola. We said our final farewell to Tampa, we had our last Publix sandwich, Jenny napped in the car, and we stayed the night with Austin and Rachel. They made us an amazing homemade pizza which we craved pretty much for the rest of the trip.


Day #2 (7/2): 717 Miles driven (1160 total miles on the trip). Milton, FL to Austin, TX passing through Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. We arrived in Austin pretty late, staying with Ben, Stephanie, and their son Jackson. We spent days #2-4 (7/2-7/4) staying and exploring in Austin, going to see the capitol, having tacos (that are now legendary in our minds..we have discussed/craved these tacos at least 712 times on the trip), and watching the 4th of July fireworks downtown.


Day #5 (7/5): 368 Miles driven (1528 total miles on the trip). Austin, TX to Odessa, TX. We drove through Texas hill country, and arrived in West Texas for a surprise visit to stay with Ben's mom and dad. They made us an awesome dinner, and she even baked us cookies for the road.


Day #6 (7/6): 210 Miles driven. Odessa, TX to Brantley Lake State Park near Carlsbad, NM (1738 total miles on the trip). This was mostly a driving day. We hung out, ate Ben's mom's cookies, and were lazy most of this day. We saw our first roadrunner and our first tarantula. We camped at the state park, and our campsite overlooked Brantley Lake.


Day #7 (7/7): 181 Miles driven (1919 total miles on the trip). We visited our first two national parks on this day - Guadalupe Mountains National Park in western Texas, and Carlsbad Caverns National Park near Carlsbad, NM. We went on a pretty long hike in Guadalupe Mountains, and we each drank about a gallon of water because it was over 100 degrees. Carlsbad was amazing, and ended up ranking very high on our "favorite national parks" list. We camped at Brantley Lake again this night, but ended up sleeping in our car for most of the night because of a lightning storm. Our tent almost flew away, and we almost died. Our cooler started leaking, and our electrical outlet in the car stopped working.



Day #8 (7/8): 79 Miles driven (1998 total miles on the trip). We drove from our campground to Roswell, NM where we visited the UFO museum and had a luxurious night of pizza and terrible Adam Sandler movies in a hotel. We fixed our cooler with bathroom Caulk, fixed Kit's outlet at the Honda dealer, and relaxed for the evening.


Day #9 (7/9): 508 Miles driven (2506 total miles on the trip). Roswell, NM to Gallup, NM. This was a pretty serious driving day. We took a weird route so we could go down to White Sands National Monument. We went sand-sledding, then gorged ourselves on a buffet dinner before driving really far. Robbie saw a tarantula in the rest stop bathroom along the way. This was another hotel night.


Day #10 (7/10): 388 Miles driven (2894 total miles on the trip). Gallup, NM to Page, AZ. This was mostly a driving day as well. We stopped at our third national park, the Petrified Forest, although we felt kind of rushed. We drove through Flagstaff, drove on Route 66 for a bit, then headed to Page where we set up camp for the night on Lake Powell near the Glen Canyon dam.


Day #11 (7/11): 308 Miles driven (3202 total miles on the trip). Page, AZ to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. This was our fourth national park, and of course it was one of our favorites. We camped at Lake Powell again this night.


Day #12 (7/12): 276 Miles driven (3478 total miles on the trip). Page, AZ to Moab, Utah. This was mostly a driving day. We wanted to drive through monument valley in eastern Arizona, so we headed up to Moab next rather than heading straight north to Zion. We got an oil change and tried to solve the age old question of "how many licks to the center of a tootsie pop" after purchasing tootsie pops at Walmart. Robbie's visor annoyed us. Jenny napped a bit. We set up camp in Moab for the night at a cute locally owned campground with tons of rabbits running around.


Day #13 (7/13): 63 Miles driven (3541 total miles on the trip). Moab, UT to Arches national park, our 5th national park. It was super, super, super hot and we almost died. We camped again in Moab this evening.


Day #14 (7/14): 111 Miles driven (3652 total miles on the trip). Moab, UT to Canyonlands national park, our 6th national park. It was super hot again, but we toured most of the (gigantic) park from our car with a couple of short hikes. We camped one more night in Moab.


Day #15 (7/15): 293 Miles driven (3945 total miles on the trip). Moab, UT to Red Canyon, UT. Another longer driving day. We passed through Capitol Reef National Park, our 7th national park. We had a picnic, picked some apricots from the plentiful fruit trees, and headed to Red Canyon where we set up camp for the night. This was our favorite campsite of the trip...the scenery was cool (the rocks were very, very RED..even redder than Moab) and we were nestled in between some trees.



Day #16 (7/16): 170 Miles driven (4115 total miles on the trip). Red Canyon, UT to Zion National Park, our 8th national park. We camped back in Red Canyon for the night and went to a little astronomy program where we got to see some cool things. This area of the country has some of the "cleanest" air in the US, with the greatest visibility and the darkest skies at night.


Day #17 (7/17): 78 Miles driven (4193 total miles on the trip). Red Canyon, UT to Bryce Canyon National Park, our 9th national park. Bryce was amazing, and luckily we did not undertake any really long hikes because it kept intermittently storming. We spent one more night at Red Canyon campground.


Day #18 (7/18): 239 Miles driven (4432 total miles on the trip). Red Canyon, UT to Lehi, UT. Driving day, and hotel night! Our first hotel night in over a week. We really, really needed some electricity and some laundry-time by this point.


Day #19 (7/19): 291 Miles driven (4723 total miles on the trip). Lehi, UT to Idaho Falls, ID. Another longer driving day. We did laundry first thing in the morning because our hotel laundry room failed to dry our clothes. Great. We drove up to Idaho and had one more hotel night. This was definitely our shadiest hotel choice..it was apparently an old apartment building, it kind of smelled weird, and everything was sort of orange-y colored. It came with free "breakfast", though, which was terrible danish-type things. Oh well, it was cheap.


Day #20 (7/20): 252 Miles driven (4975 total miles on the trip). Idaho Falls, ID to West Yellowstone (by way of the Grand Tetons National Park, our 10th national park). We toured around a bit in the Grand Tetons, hiked around Jenny Lake, and headed up through Yellowstone (trying to avert our eyes because we wanted to wait until the next day to REALLY visit Yellowstone). We camped in West Yellowstone in a cheesy, terrible campground where where we were sandwiched in like sardines. We camped next to people who cooked delicious food, making our tent smell like delicious food and making us prime bear targets. We survived.


Day #21 (7/21): 135 Miles driven (5110 total miles on the trip). West Yellowstone, MT to Yellowstone National park, our 11th national park. We spent most of our day on the southern loop of the park (the section containig Old Faithful). It was amazing, creepy, and fantastic. We camped in West Yellowstone again.



Day #22 (7/22): 145 Miles driven (5255 total miles on the trip). West Yellowstone, MT to Yellowstone National Park again. We spent most of our day on the northern loop of the park (the section containing Tower Falls and the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone). We camped again in West Yellowstone.


Day #23 (7/23): 359 Miles driven (5614 total miles on the trip). West Yellowstone, MT to Missoula, MT by way of Yellowstone National Park. This was a loooong day. We were pretty sick of the car, but we needed to cover a lot of ground so we could make it to Glacier-area the next day. We visited Mammoth Hot springs, saw the Roosevelt Arch at the north entrance, and headed to Missoula where we had a hotel night.


Day #24 (7/24): 163 Miles driven (5777 total miles on the trip). Missoula, MT to West Glacier, MT. We had lots of delicious food in Missoula, stocked up on some new snacks, then headed up to West Glacier to camp and relax for the night.


Day #25: (7/25): 115 Miles driven (5892 total miles on the trip). West Glacier, MT to Glacier National Park, our 12th and final national park of the trip. It also turned out to be our favorite. Several trails were closed due to "bear activity" or "mountain lion activity". What?? We camped back at West Glacier for the night, and prepared for our final leg of the trip. We bought an audio book online after much debate, and we ended up hating it. Oh well.


Day #26 (7/26): 420 Miles driven 6312 total miles on the trip). West Glacier, MT to Kennewick, WA. We stayed in a hotel this evening en route to Corvallis.


Day #27 (7/27): 325 Miles driven (6637 total miles on the trip). Kennewick, WA to Corvallis, Oregon. Our new home! We camped at the Corvallis KOA which was our temporary home for about the next week.



Day #28-Day #33 (7/28-8/2): We experienced bored homelessness in the form of living in a tent at the KOA. We spent most of our time getting lost and scouring rental ads until we found our new home! We did spend one day hiking through Silver Falls State Park where we saw some awesome waterfalls.


So, here we are, 33 days and 6,637 miles later. We hope you've enjoyed the journey with us. We only hope that we can do something like this again in the future.

Marshmallows

Our stuff arrived at around 5pm after a brief delay of the ABF truck driver having to figure out how to lug our cubes up the hill. We jumped up and down a little bit, then opened the cube doors, half expecting the worst. We did have several days to pack in Tampa to ensure a snug fit, but our stuff moved over 3,000 miles on a semi truck so we wouldn't be surprised if there was some shifting.

Cube #1. The only difference we can see is the palm tree in the corner of picture #1 and the pine tree in the corner of picture #2.


Cube #2. The only things displaced were the bright yellow frisbee and the mail crate. The fan moved a bit. Overall, not too bad, especially since this was our haphazard cube.


We spent all evening unloading the cube, bruising ourselves, breaking our backs, inadvertently letting in bugs, cats, and dogs. We had a couple of play breaks with the cats..this one is a kitten who is very frisky and liked our packing rope:


Later, as it was getting darker outside, we realized we needed to close our sliding glass door between loads because the bugs were attracted to our lights. We came in, shut the door, and a few minutes later one of the cats (who had apparently come inside at some point, unbeknownst to us) came darting around the corner, making a beeline for the sliding glass door. The poor little thing ran right smack into the glass. He seemed so shocked by the whole situation that he ran into the door about three more times for good measure before darting over into the corner. This all happened over the course of about 0.3 seconds. We let the poor little thing out, and of course as a resilient little kitten he was completely fine.

A lot of our boxes say things like, "Iron. Computer Chair arms. Fan." but some say things like, "Breadmaker and lots of random crap. This one will be fun to unpack!" We haven't even started to unpack the actual boxes. This is the general state of the house:


We did set up the most important thing, though. Our BED. A few years ago, when we both had "real people jobs" for the first time, we bought a big TV and a mattress. We went all out with this mattress, and we have not regretted this decision one second over the past three years. Our bed is basically made of fluffy, delicious marshmallows. We call it the marshmallow bed because it's kind of how you would envision a big marshmallow feeling if you could lay on it. The salesman who sold us our mattress threw in some awesome pillows, too, which are also made of marshmallows. I am now blogging from the bed, and I could not care less what the rest of the house looks like right now. Our bedroom is in the back of the apartment, which is up against a covered walkway (because it apparently rains here sometimes) next to our landlords' garage. In the middle of the day, it is nearly pitch black in our new bedroom, making it an awesome nap cave. It's pretty exciting.

If you have ever wondered how many loads of laundry it would take to wash every single item of clothing you own, stay tuned. We are on load #3. We used every item of clothing as some sort of weird wrapping or packing device. A vase? Let's wrap it in four of Jenny's sweaters! A glass bowl? Let's shove some of Robbie's socks in it! So all of our clothes smell kind of like vase or bowl or playstation now.

Anyway, it's time to sleep on marshmallow bed. Robbie's interview went well, and he has a 50/50 chance of landing the job. He is going back tomorrow (with one other candidate) to teach a lesson to some kids while being observed. Hopefully it goes well...that would be one more thing to check off our list toward getting settled as Oregonians.

Don't worry...we are still planning some kind of big finale post with pictures of our journey. Good night!

Coming soon: Our Stuff

Short post tonight because we're tired...

Well, we signed our lease today. We are scheduled to move into our new place tomorrow afternoon. We looked through the apartment again, and it's going to be a large, nice place for us. As we were leaving, we glanced over at the corner of the yard and noticed that there were 6 wild turkeys hanging out and making gobbley noises. The landlords' cats were in the trees, quietly stalking the turkeys. This will take some getting used to. Anyway, ABF is scheduled to drop off our cubes and all of our glorious belongings sometime between 2 and 7 tomorrow.

We went up to Portland today, met up with Ashley, and retrieved Kirby and Mr. Plant. They had a lot of fun, and they spent the past few days up on the Washington coast (apparently they spent a bit of time up in the town where the Twilight books took place). We are spending one last night in a hotel, right down on the Willamette river, and we're trying to rest up our muscles for lots of heavy furniture moving tomorrow. Let's hope all of our things make it, safe and sound.

The end is near

It looks like our homeless adventure may be coming to an end in a few short days. You will recall that we found a house we really liked...well, that one ended up NOT working out, and we don't want to talk about it. But out of our sadness/failure came a really cool place that we like just as much, if not more. We will now be living in the northwest corner of town, up situated in the hills bordering the town. It's in a neighborhood with lots of dead ends and lots of winding roads where the houses are a good distance from each other.

Our apartment is basically a good chunk of our landlords' house, situated downstairs with nearly 1100 square feet, two bedrooms, a really nice kitchen (although without a dishwasher..that's ok, it was low on our list of necessities), and a gigantic living room. It has lots of storage space, a wood burning stove, a yard, a covered patio (because apparently it does rain here) and an amazing washer and dryer. The lot is very quiet. Our landlords have three huge outdoor dogs, two of which are always behind a fence and are there for "intimidation factor", and one of which is a very sweet old lab who was apparently sprayed by a skunk yesterday. Luckily, from our interactions today we have determined that these are the types of dogs that make you feel safe but will not be annoying and barking all the time. They also have a couple of outdoor cats and a bunch of chickens ("help yourself to the eggs"). They have a garden, and said we are welcome to plant some things if we want to (we have no experience with this, but it could be fun). The landlords are cool. We drove up, and the wife was covered head to toe in dirt because she was messing around in the garden; the husband was probably the most "chill" human being we have ever met.

It's about 4 miles from campus, but an easy bike ride through farmer's fields (no vehicles allowed, but the farmer built a bike path for just this purpose) and a city bike path through an old covered bridge. It's going to be quiet..rural/forested, but very close to town. It should be awesome. We are hoping to move in on Tuesday or Wednesday. We are going up to Portland to pick up Kirby and Mr. Plant from Ashley tomorrow, then we are spending the night in a hotel so Robbie has access to a good night's sleep and an iron before his interview Tuesday. Hopefully, we can start moving in (at least with our car stuff) Tuesday night!

Doin' the Limbo

We are closing out July the same way that we started it out: Homeless. We woke up this morning to a cold, cloudy day. The kind of morning where you expect it to start raining on you, but it never does. The air matress has to be acknowledged as a success, because we didn't even wake up in time to go to the Farmer's Market. If you don't get there in the first couple of hours, all the good stuff is gone (Rule #1 of the market. Rule #2 is never talk about the market). We made up for the lack of fresh fruit with a nice batch of campstove pancakes, and around noon the clouds cleared away and we had another sunny, 80 degree day.

We are still camping out at the KOA campground outside of town. We spent a while going through the list of things we could do: bowling, watch a movie, go to a u-pick farm, drive to the coast, etc. We are still pretty set against getting back in the car for any extended period of time, especially with a Portland excursion planned for Monday afternoon to pick up Kirby and Mr. Plant. We stayed a little low-key today, stopping for lunch at a deli in town and then going to the cinema to see Inception. Actually, we walked up to the movie theater to see what the movies were, both figuring we would be choosing Toy Story 3, but it wasn't on for a couple hours, so we chose Inception. It was the first time I had ever gone to a move without the slightest idea of the plot or who any of the main actors were (you do not see many movie promos when you are homeless!), but it was great.

We left the theater and decided to get some ice cream. Jenny was convinced the Dairy Queen was downtown next to the Mexican restaurant we ate at last night (wrong, it was a Baskin Robbins). Robbie was convinced that it was next to the Safeway on the other side of town (also wrong, it was a Burger King). After driving around for a half an hour, we gave up our search and let Tom-Tom get us there. The sad thing is the town actually has TWO Dairy Queens, and we couldn't find either one.

Either way, we ended our evening back at camp. We are continuing to be patient, and are hoping (and planning!) that tomorrow is the day we hear about the house that we want!

The day of the falls

We decided to dust off our hiking shoes and head to the state park we talked about yesterday - Silver Falls State Park, which is just east of Salem. It's the largest state park in Oregon, and it has a trail that is 8.7 miles long called the Trail of 10 falls (which, appropriately named, winds around to ten different waterfalls). It was still fairly early by the time we got there, so we decided to undertake the hike. It was a gorgeous day with perfect weather - sunny (it still hasn't rained, people!), around 80 degrees (but very pleasant in the shade), and a clear blue sky. We hiked along, passing very few people along the way, and had a chance to see some amazing waterfalls.

Pictures of some of the waterfalls along the way:





Since the past few days have been composed mostly of laying around, our feet are understandably a little tired right now.

We made another important purchase today: An air mattress. Ours died a few months ago, so we were in the market for one anyway. We have been sleeping on camping pads this whole time, and we didn't want the trouble of lugging an air mattress across the country. Apparently camping pads are not meant to be slept on for weeks at a time because we keep waking up with aches and pains in muscles we never knew existed. We are now sitting on our luxurious queen mattress composed of air and happiness. We even went so far as to carry out a meal from a restaurant, come back here, and eat food on our new bed while watching old episodes of Arrested Development. We didn't exactly plan on that, but our tent is about 10 degrees warmer than outside. The temperature seems to drop off rapidly in the evenings here..it is usually in the 80s during the day and drops down to 50 at night. Our campground got really busy tonight (I guess because it's Friday? It is Friday, right?) so there are people all around us. One family of four next to us has set up some sort of small tent city, including various tent buildings (apparently one for sleeping and one as a living room?), a huge flat screen TV, and two cars.

We're not sure what's going on tomorrow with the exception of the Saturday farmer's market. We might find some U-pick farms in the area to go get some fruit. In other news, homelessness continues.

The waiting is the hardest part

Recap of the past 24 hours: We stayed up as late as possible so we could sleep in as long as possible. We woke up around 10 (aka 1pm Tampa time), and we briefly pictured ourselves getting out of work in 2 and a half hours if we had still been on the east coast. We then kept ourselves very busy by reading (Jen) and playing basketball (Robbie). We went out for lunch (laughing at MLB network because the evening shows had started and it was only 3pm..love the Pacific time zone), drove around some more, picked up some groceries, and came back to camp where Jen resumed her book and Robbie pretty much sat on the computer all evening.

Yes. Today could potentially win the award for the most boring day of our lives.

Let me begin by saying that we think Oregon is awesome. We really like it here, and there are hundreds and hundreds of cool things around for us to explore. Unfortunately, for now we are kind of sick of exploring and definitely sick of sitting in the car. We asked the campground owner for cool things in the area to do, and one of her suggestions involved something that was 2 or 3 hours away. We had a moment of dry heaving, picturing ourselves sitting in the car again, surrounded by our dreaded snacks.

We really aren't having a bad-attitude kind of day...just a lazy day. Totally lazy. The laziest day ever. We may go to a state park tomorrow that is about an hour's drive, or we may sprawl around, drooling on ourselves like slugs again. I guess we shall call that the "homeless prerogative"...we will do what we want, when we want. It's kind of sweet, but we could also go for a home sometime in the near future.

We have no pictures to share today...obviously. We'll see what tomorrow holds.