Oregon & Washington State

For our family vacation this year, we decided to explore Oregon and Washington State. Specifically, Portland, Oregon, Seattle, Washington and Elwha/Port Angeles, Washington area (further out Northwest).

The Fireman, the girl and I left Saturday, June 4th, 2016 around 9:30 am or so, stopping for coffee on the way to the airport. We left truck at our favorite PreFlight Checkin and had enough points for a free park. They shuttled us to the airport and we were checked in by 4:45pm. Fast check in! We stopped at Chili’s for a quick dinner. We had time for a drink to kick off the vacation right, the girl had a shirley temple.

Cape Cod, Massachusetts

For our 7th year anniversary, the Fireman and I decided to go to Dennis Port, Cape Cod. We left on August 3rd, a Thursday after work and dropping off the girl with my parents. We had time to stop in at Fogo de Chão, a Brazilian steak house. It was sooo good! Those guys in those fun gaucho pants were on it! If you’ve never been to one of these restaurants before, they give you a token with one green and one red side. When you’re ready for meat, you flip the token to green and they just keep it coming!

You will end up so full, but happy! There’s a salad bar to load up on first, and a hot soup, bread and bacon bar. The bacon was a brown sugar peppercorn bacon and was incredible! I could have just eaten plates of that and be good to go.

Holiday Open House 2016

Last weekend we hosted an open house for Christmas. I had originally planned on just inviting my group of girls, 6 of us in total, on Sat Dec 10, but so many of them had plans on the weekends leading up to Christmas, that I decided to just open it up to all of our friends, family, work folks, etc. We didn’t have time to make the changes on Dec 10, so we moved it to Dec 17th, from 6-10pm.

Will change do you good?

The Fireman and I went over our Washington plans again on Saturday. We talked about changes again to the Washington portion of the plan. The town in which had envisioned living has thrown up so many road blocks for our rentals that we looked around at other properties in other counties.

We originally decided that even if we couldn’t do our rentals in the town we chose, we would want to eventually relocate and live there to build our Forever Home. Now, we’re contemplating if there would be another town that had ‘It All’, too. But one that would also allow us to do our vacation homes, and preferably the yurts.

Natural Shampoo – Spicy…

So, the only product in my house that I didn’t make myself was my shampoo and conditioner. I use a deposit only hair color to make my red pop. Cause of a pesky little thing called age, my hair has lost that gorgeous red color and looks more like a slightly auburn pine needle color. Ah well.

At some point, I’d like to consider trying henna to color. At least my beautician uses a deposit only color, which doesn’t open the hair follicle, so less chemicals. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Christmas Plans

So, I tried to schedule a holiday party with The Girls. The group of girls that I always get together with to watch Outlander, movies, or occasionally have book club meetings with. We sometimes think we are a book club, but mostly we just chat.

With the holidays being so crazy, I could only get 2 of the 5 other ladies together and while I am not opposed to hanging out with these two lovely ladies, I had another idea. I decided to invite like everyone. I invited my work friends, my husband’s firefighter friends, my parents, my old work friends (from another job) and my theatre friends. It’s gonna get crazy, ya’ll!

Changes to the Dream

So, dreams can change. There’s a lot of truth to that. We aren’t totally changing our dream plans, but we are slightly modifying them. That happens. We roll.

We found out that the county in which our property resides isn’t very helpful about building permits and vacation rentals in general. Their goal is to minimize rentals and hotels and multi family buildings. We never planned on a large rental situation, but I get their goal to maintain the serenity of the place.

Directionally Challenged?

Sunday, I finally got around to painting the compass at the end of my hallway. It’s a project I’ve been wanting to do for a few months, so I was glad I finally got around to it.

Decisions

After our first decision to pursue land and our dream, the Fireman and I planned a weekend in October to fly back to Washington State and look at land to purchase.

During this time, I did a TON of research and got our assets together and was able to get a raw land loan for the property.

It took us a while to get a real estate agent. Several of them didn’t return our calls, not sure why. We finally got one we loved, who seemed eager to help out. We gave her our final list of Top 8 properties.

The Birth of the Dream

June 2016 – We went on vacation to Oregon and Washington. You can read about the vacation itself on the The Travels page. Go ahead and check it out, I’ll wait.

Done? Okay.

So, we love to travel. And every time we travel, we think ‘Is this where we want to retire’? We have really loved our vacations. Some places we love, like Vegas or Branson, but we know we’d never want to live there. Then others, like Knoxville, Tennessee, Galena, IL, Petosky, MI, Indiana or Wisconsin we really loved, but just weren’t sure if we wanted that to be our “Forever Home”.