Well, barring any glitches it looks like we’ve got a new house. Our first offer was accepted late this afternoon by a seller who had been dealing with another potential buyer for about two months (bad finances). Figure the exasperation factor plays in our favor on this one. It’s a lot more money than our last house, but I think we’re in solid shape to handle it and part of our offer was that the seller would pay our closing costs (which in this case was just about five grand, yikes!) Also nice is that the last potential buyer already paid for an inspection and appraisal, so if our lender is cool with using their work then that could potentially streamline things and also save us a few hundred dollars. The house is in a nice quiet neighborhood near a school and community park (literally across the street from our back fence). So I guess quiet is relative, but quiet from traffic at least. Kind of on the edge of Yakima (Southwest corner), but should only be a four mile drive for me to work (potentially bikeable, we’ll see). Here’s a Google Map for those of you interested (it’s actually a couple of houses down from the corner, not where the google map pointer is pointing). Hopefully Mary’s drive isn’t too much further once we figure out what she’s doing. Orchards right around the corner and foothills in view.

Sorry I really should’ve taken one shot of the entire front of the house. Left side: attached two stall garage. Right side: front of house.

Neighborhood looking South and North.

View over back fence. Lots of room for chasing soccer balls around.

Kitchen (the eye sore mirrored doors are hiding a washer and drier, which seems a little strange for a kitchen, but we’ll figure something out). Living room.

That’s all for now. I do have a few pictures of the backyard and bedrooms and will post when I get a chance.

I have to keep this short after using most of my allotted library computer time to write up the last three posts. So quick update.

First impressions of Yakima are a mixed bag. I’ve been pretty thoroughly bombarded with negative feedback about Yakima pretty much everywhere I go. The guys at Walmart in Post Falls, ID (not exactly the most happening spot in the world) without any provocation ranted at length about how much they dislike this city and how it’s the last place in the world they would ever live and make sure you lock your car and watch out for drive-by shooting and blah blah blah. And the crime statistics are rather impressively large for a city this size. But I’ve been around enough to take this with a grain of salt.

My first look at Yakima was definitely a look at the poorer part of town, arriving in a beatup looking downtown that was largely desolate on a Sunday morning. I really didn’t mind it though. To me it was just neat to be somewhere different. Somewhere with a different feel. And clearly downtown Yakima has a very distinct feel to it. Hispanic leanings. Western influence. Yes it’s unkempt, but I also don’t need to live or even really visit this part of town if I choose not to.

Heading West toward the friend’s house where I’m staying though brought a very different look. Dogwood and Lilac lined streets, tidy green yards and people out walking their dogs. Interesting mix of architectural styles. Some Spanish-looking. Some stately colonial. Very hilly terrain with no sidewalks (but also little traffic).

And everywhere there are foothills as a backdrop. This I dig. I used to play this computer game called Sim City 2000 where you begin with a customized terrain and then grow a digital city. Invariably my chosen starting location would be an area surrounded by hills. I like the idea of living in a place where you can get to significant elevation change within a half hour.

Anyway, since I’m down to about five minutes… what I’ve been up to… Sunday I spent several hours driving around Yakima, getting acquainted, finding grocery stores, and checking out potential residential neighborhoods. Monday I met with a Realtor and spent six hours walking through houses all over this city. Yesterday I re-walked through two houses that I wanted to see again and made an offer on one of the houses, then spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get a few financial details I order. So today I’m just waiting to find out if our house offer was accepted and making a move from there.

Pictures to come when I can find a place that offers free Wi-fi (seems no one does here, not even the library, ridiculous).

…

Update. Found a bakery with free wireless access after talking with a woman at the Yakima Visitor’s Center. I think there are also a couple of shopping complexes in the area that offer free access. Beats paying for T-Mobile Hotspot at Starbucks. So, I was able to upload a few pictures below from my trip out.

Also, just so I’m not giving off the wrong impression, actually the more time I’m spending around Yakima, the more I’m liking it. I’m finding more interesting neighborhoods and driving through vineyard-covered hillsides. Like I said, downtown is definitely a dive, but access to interesting hiking, biking, skiing and whitewater is all within an hour’s drive.

07:30 Back on the road. I slept about the same as last night. Beginning on my surf board before somehow ending up back in the drivers seat shaking in the cold. 4:30 local time and I have the roads all to my slow-driving self.

09:26 Coming over a pass near Moses Lake, I get my first good view of snowy Cascade peaks.

10:33 Now this is what a rest area should look like. Pictures of Columbia River East of Ellensburg (will be added when I’m able to connect somewhere with my laptop).

10:40 Cross Columbia River.

11:45 I stop at a rest area just outside of Selah, WA. Since it’s about 8:45 AM local time and I don’t want to show up at my destination too early on a Sunday morning so I end up spending about half an hour just relaxing and loosening up while looking out at the Yakima Valley with Mount Adams and Mount Rainier in the distance.

12:30 Yakima! End mileage 64,905.

05:50 Back on the road. Ugh. It’s never a good night’s sleep when you’re curled up in a ball shivering in the driver’s seat. For a while I slept on top of my surf board, with my feet near the windshield and my head scrunched up against the ceiling in the back. This was surprisingly comfortable, so I’m not sure why I moved to the driver’s seat in the middle of the night. I woke up with stiff knees and a sore back, tumbled out of the car, then jogged around the rest area briefly before brushing my teeth and heading out.

07:28 106 mph. Just for a second. And on a slight downhill. In hindsight I realize that this was probably not at all healthy for the longevity of my car given the cargo weight.

07:35 Fuel. Bismarck, ND 196 miles 7.34 gallons $22.75.

09:25 My memories of North Dakota will forever be of rain and fog.

09:35 Theodore Roosevelt National Park. From the map and the pictures I looked at online I thought this would be a pretty lame National Park (which seemed grossly unfair to Teddy), but even in the rain and while speeding past at eighty five mph it really was a pretty area. I would’ve even considered stopping for an hour or two if not for the downpour. No pictures, sorry.

09:52 Several tumbleweed blow across my path. I find this intensely amusing and bellow “Tumbleweed!” each time. Hey, how often while driving on I-96 does this happen? It’s a whole new world.

09:59 Montana! We’ll chalk up North Dakota as a loss. Nothing too exciting to see and really I couldn’t even see the lack of excitement due to inclement weather.

10:12 Fuel. Glendive, MT 191 miles 7.59 gallons $23.75. Man. My rear tires are looking bare.

11:00 “Well boys and girls, see you next time for new adventures will Ranger Will.” I spent about half an hour listening to one of those old time radio programs with voice actors playing roles in a story. This one was about a truck full of nitroglycerin that has its brakes go out as its cruising down a hill toward a small town below.

11:21 Police officer lurking in the median. This will end up being the only one I will see in all of Montana (10 miles east of Miles City for those of you keeping track at home).

13:28 Fuel. Billings, MT 219 miles 7.99 gallons $25.80.

15:23 Rumble strip streak over. I had a fairly spectacular no-rumblestrip streak going, spanning several cross-country trips and including very long periods of sleepy driving on winding roads. This was a deceptive stretch of rumblestrips though. On a set of switch backs heading downhill near Bozeman, MT the rumblestrips nudged over the white lane line and extended into the lane by about eight inches. Not entirely fair, but kind of a relief to be down with it though too. Those of you with slight OCD tendencies will understand what I’m talking about. Speaking of Bozeman, if this area were in a more convenient location it would undoubtedly be the next Boulder, CO or Bend, OR. Gorgeous area.

16:36 Fuel. Butte, MT 224 miles 7.55 gallons $24.17.

17:03 First Washington license plate that I’ve see. I’m happy to see that it’s a Jeep caked in mud.

17:35 I retract my exclamation point from 09:59. This state is endless. I’ve taken to frequently exclaming “Montany” followed by fits of laughter at random intervals. Lucidness seems to be slipping.

20:20 Idaho! Shortest state on this drive other than Indiana. In your face Montana!

20:46 Fuel. Coeur d’Alene, ID 281 miles 9.33 gallons $28.63.

21:00 Disaster strikes! Remember the tread wear from earlier in the trip? Well, in a bout of “If I ignore it it will go away” thinking I did ignore it until I realized that my car was shaking like crazy every time I drove between fifty and sixty-five mph. Checking my rear tires revealed multiple six inch swaths of exposed threads. Oh no! I’m so close. I thought about slowing driving the last couple hundred miles. I though about duct taping my tires. I thought about trying to rotate my tires front to back (painstakingly raising each insanely heavy corner of my car one at a time on a flimsy jack). In the end I decide that I don’t want to die when a tire blows on a mountian pass in Washington. Given that it’s late evening on a Saturday night my options are limited. To one option. A Walmart in Post Falls, ID. The guys in the tire center are genuinely impressed by the damage I’ve inflicted on my tires to the point of much head shaking and snapping of pictures.

21:50 Back on the road, driving like a old man. Time is no longer an issue as I’ve lost my shot at arriving in Yakima in two days, with my biggest concern now being how not to destroy my brand new tires. So I keep the speedometer right around fifty for the remainder of the night’s driving.

23:27 Rest area for the night. Sprague, WA.

09:56 Car packed. Dogs secured. I’m off! I must say this might be the world’s greatest car packing job ever. In the history of the road trip I don’t think anyone has ever utilized the available cargo space more efficiently. I have clothing crammed in every air pocket and boxes stacked within fractions of an inch of the walls. Amazing. As of yesterday afternoon my idea had been a pre-dawn departure (gotta beat Chicago traffic!), but the more I thought about it the more I realized how nice it would be not to feel rushed in the morning. I ended up spending the morning loading up my car at a relaxing pace and sat in the sun in the backyard with the dogs while they played for about half an hour before I left. I think it was the right way to go. Beginning car mileage 62,704.

10:02 US 131, heading South. I guess this is when the trip officially begins for me. Even with the weight, my Focus seems to be humming along just fine.

10:08 Something in the cargo in the back of the car begins to squeak. And keeps squeaking for miles and miles.

10:12 U2 – In the Name of Love. Good song. So long WGRD. Despite my usual annoyance with our GR radio stations I actually ended up listening to local stations until they faded out. Nostalgia I guess.

10:25 After passing car loads and bus loads of the elderly dressed in traditional Dutch outfits I realize that I’m leaving just before Holland’s Tulip Time Festival. I’m not particularly broken up about this.

10:45 First block of construction. Roughly eleven miles. Traffic is moving smoothly though.

12:52 Comisky! I remember when Mary and I went to a game here a few years back on one of their cheap ticket days. We showed up at about the third inning, parked for free, and had much of an upper deck section to ourselves.

13:22 Fuel. One of those roadside vendor islands. Des Plains, IL 203 miles 8.72 gallons $28.68.

15:10 I’m quite impressed by the range of the Chicago sports radio station AM 670. Most days I can get a fairly static-free signal from 670 in GR and now I’ve been able to continue listening well into Wisconsin. It’s a significantly superior sports station to anything we have in Grand Rapids and I’ve been laughly consistently for the past couple of hours (which is a potent method for staying alert while driving). I particularly like the lack of respect for all things politically correct. They joke about recently killed Cardinals pitcher (drunk driving accident) and how considerate of him it was to crash into the back of a tow truck, adding that next time he should careen into an ambulance then roll to a stop in front of a morgue. They call Cardinals manager Tony and LaRussa a “throbbing rectum” and spend fifteen minutes ripping on his personal character. And later they spend thirty minutes breaking down the ridiculousness of Rev Jesse Jackson’s demand for a statue of Ernie Banks (tangenting into a laundry list of obscure 1980’s White Sox and Cubs players who also deserve a statue “Why not Wayne Tolleson?”). Good educated baseball talk. Enjoyable.

17:58 Fuel. Menomonie, WI 315 miles 9.36 gallons $29.00. One note of concern. When I take a peak at my tires the rear tires seem to be worn down significantly more than the front ones. I don’t think this was the case upon my GR departure. (Note: this ends up biting me on day two)

19:19 Metrodome! I think I could live in Minneapolis. Something about it just strikes me right.

20:58 Down pour. I’m kind of glad I decided to take the North Dakota route as I listen to the radio and hear reports of violent storms shredding through Kansas. This rain isn’t any fun, but it beats a Tornado.

21:33 Light rain. Traffic really flying now though. (Brandon, MN)

22:57 Fuel. Moorhead, MN 302 miles 8.88 gallons $27.00.

23:03 North Dakota!

23:42 Rest area for the night.