Hanging Up the Keys?

If you've noticed (like Sister Sherry) that we've been making an awful lot of trips to town, it's true. We have been dealing with bankers, insurance agents, appraisers and now, engineers! We spent a great deal of time this winter trying to make up our minds about what we are going to do next. We've pretty much lived in our RV and on the road ever since we retired almost eleven years ago. When we decided last fall, for a variety of reasons, that we weren't going to spend the winter in Arizona, it started us down a different path.

We had wanted to remain in the area for our dear friend Vic, who was nearing the end of his time with us. Though the winter itself was just plain awful (between the snow, ice and cold!), we enjoyed being close to both our family and our church family. As we started talking about summer travel plans, we realized that, while we certainly haven't seen everything, there was nowhere we had a burning desire to see. We had reached our initial goal of traveling through all of the 48 contiguous states a year or so ago.

Forry needs to have some work (i.e. replacements) on both his hips and his knees. That also  meant staying in the area. Then there was the whole issue of how tiring setting up and tearing down was getting to be for us - we're not getting any younger you know...

I had always said that someday I wanted to live near a body of water and we had off and on talked about it. One day Niece Becky told us about the house on Moses Lake that her brother-in-law had gutted and was rebuilding. We went to take a look and were very impressed. Craig does beautiful work! We looked at several other lake front houses, but...

So that's what we've been doing. It's been a bit of an ordeal as nothing about it has gone easily. The latest snag was a letter from the Feds that the house was in a "flood zone" and would require pricey flood insurance. Which prompted our today's trip to an engineer's office to start the process of getting an Elevation Certificate which can be used to exempt the dwelling.

One of these days, we just may get all of the paperwork taken care of, then we'll park Auntie Violet in the driveway and begin to enjoy our new house on the lake.