And Now For Something Completely Different...

The time has come to end this blog adventure. Our road trip has landed us in our new adopted city, the house is found and rented, and the trailer has been stripped of all our belongings.

Our now empty trailer. We took the mattresses out to use as temporary beds until we get our furniture from SB.

There are still many months of processing what we have seen and recovering from the intensity of the road, but for now I just want to say thank you to all of my wonderful friends who have followed us on through our journey. It's been incredibly fun to share it all with you. I will leave you with a few pictures of the new house as a final curtain to this Great American Roadtrip Spectacular. You haven't really gone on a true adventure until you come back home, or whatever it was Dorthy Gale once said...

The porch is big enough to put a couch on, my favorite kind of porch. I will go shopping for some little lantern lights to put up as well. I'm contemplating using Holly Mackay's recycled can candle holder lanterns also.

Grown-up houses like this one have coat closets. This one is huge inside, it's practically a whole mudroom.

There are stairs going up, and more stairs going down. It seems like such a big house, and all of the stairs are INSIDE. Anyone who has been to our last house will know how special that is for us.

The living room is a good size and is augmented in it's openness by the dining room which seems to have nice light. I can't wait to have breakfast in there.

There are a lot of different rooms, but the downstairs has a nice open feel to it. You can see most of it from anywhere on that level. This is a shot of the front door from the kitchen.

The kitchen is pretty shiny. We aren't quite sure yet if we can handle all the fancy features, but we will try. Elijah got a little excited when he realized the oven is split into two. You can cook at two different temperatures at the same time.

An extra room behind the kitchen leads down to the backyard. It has these odd and interesting steps, but is big enough for doing yoga, painting, or having a small dance party. All of which I intend to do.

There is a covered patio complete with audacious light fixture, and behind that garage door is a wet bar.

The outside has a wood burning fire place. It may take us a little before we are comfortable enough with ourselves to actually light it, but there is a pile of kindling in the corner of the yard that is clearly meant for burning in this.

On stormy winter days we can snuggle and watch movies in the basement. The carpet is thick and the room is warm and solid feeling.

Upstairs are three bedrooms just right for the family. It's so much bigger than we are used to, and yet in many ways the perfect size for the five of us. I think as we move in and get our furniture and our books and things around us it will start to feel alive and very functional. There's an office/bedroom on the main floor just right for guests. and the rec room downstairs can house a whole family, it's the size of half our last house and bigger than the trailer we just spent two months in. We registered to vote today right after signing the lease, just barely making the deadline. We are officially Oregonians, and we are home.

The Rest Was Silence

I'm quietly sitting in Lisa and Gregory's living room in Mosier, OR. I can hear distant cars on the highway, the occasional train, and if I stand up I can see a little light reflecting on the Columbia River. It is so peaceful here. I love to visit their house. The kids and Elijah have gone to bed in the trailer which is set up outside. The faintest smell of fall is in the air. Gregory has been harvesting pumpkins from their patch. We are only an hour from Portland, our final destination, but it is so calm and comfortable here that we have decided to stay a couple days before moving on to the end of the journey. Mosier feels like the very beginning of the Pacific Northwest. The desert wasteland of the last several days lasted just until about two bends in the river before Mosier. When you get here suddenly there are trees, and the air has more moisture, and the little town is beautiful and filled with little flower gardens. It's a small town with a good local coffe shop (probably the reason Elijah is excited to stay), and two boys near Eli and Izzy's age who live in the house in front of this house. We couldn't have asked for a better soft landing. Allowing us to inch our way back into reality, shake a little of the dust off, and prepare for our next big adventure, finding a house to live in and getting the kids into a new school. We've been on the road for two months. What a ride we've had. We have seen so many sights, visited so many people, driven through so many states, all in our little mini-van with the whole family close in together the whole way. I've shared a lot of the adventure in these blog entries, with pictures of the sights, and thoughts about the state of country. What I didn't share as much of was the squabbles, and tantrums, the late night melt downs, the fever of being in the car too long, the moments when all the kids were homesick at the same time and wanted to go back to SB, the times when I had to struggle to entertain the kids get Elijah work space and get us to the next city five hours away. It's been a really intense experience, there are memories we will always have, and a lot of them are good. And now we are all ready to stop living out of the car.

One of the greatest things about this moment in Lisa and Gregory's living room in Mosier, OR is that nobody else is here, I am all alone in the house and the silence is blissful.