On the Brink of Our Next Adventure

It’s been a grueling couple of months, for me at least. Tracy, ever the stoic, has remained calm, while my psyche has run a marathon over mountains and through swamps, chasing house after house. Behind us the whole way has been the charge of handing the Airstream to our insurance company. If the house hunt was like a marathon, the insurance deal was like something wild we had to drag along behind us on a rope, banging the back of our knees when we were at our slowest. The finish line is in sight, though.

As I write this, neither deal is sealed, but we’re close. (If you haven’t guessed, we found a house.)

What odd timing. On day two of moving stuff out of the Airstream and the storage unit into the apartment, we had to stop everything to see this house. Houses where we want to live are selling within a day or two of being on the market, so we ground our moving inertia to a halt to walk around a very odd house. Then, as we went back to the move, Tracy’s brain worked on how much it might cost to renovate the house, and then on an offer and a bidding plan. 

Fast forward four days of moving. As soon as we were in the apartment, our lease at the campground ran out and no tow truck had picked up the Airstream, so we had to go back to the campground and through the process of hitching up a final time to move it to a field we’d rented a spot in.* What a surreal experience—the trailer was entirely empty, all our tools were in the wrong spots. I could hardly remember which way was up.

Once we’d gotten to that field, to park we had to back the trailer up a hill in thick grass, which tilted the hitch so it took a few tricks to unhitch the truck. My heart was racing. What a bumpy goodbye. 

And, as we were driving away from the Airstream we’d left empty in that field, the tow truck guy called saying he was ready to pick up the trailer from the campsite! If he’d called just a bit earlier we’d have been spared the final weird trip (plus the $50 we had to pay to park in the field). 

*Sure wish that had been the final time! But that’s a different story.

The final stretch of the marathon came that afternoon when our real estate agent called to tell us we’d outbid the other wanna-be buyers on the house. 

In all my details here, I lost the succinct telling of the timing weirdness: the day we moved out of the Airstream, we saw the house. The day we moved the Airstream for the last time, we learned we’re gonna buy the house. Two homes for us, bumping along together in our weird journey forward.  And let’s not forget that my decision to leave the road happened almost simultaneously with the trailer being deemed totaled, two events so close together that it’s hard to parse cause and effect. Time. Huh.

To be clear: we still have the title to the Airstream. The tow guy has to get out at the field now, and then we’ll hand it over after that. The end of a very long, painful process. (Note that asterisk above: the process turned out to be longer than we thought.)

To be clear with the house: we haven’t had it inspected yet much less closed on it. And when we do, when we have the keys in hand, we have to do some major work before we can move in, and we want to do other major work before we want to move in. Here’s where the apartment helps (expensively); we can live in it while the most disruptive renovations happen. 

I don’t want to jinx the house inspection and closing by saying too much. I will say it’s in the coolest part of Madison (for us aging hippies): even in snow and ice we can walk to most places we need to go, and you know I am a big fan of walking (and bike riding). When I lived in Montana I did both instead of driving—year-round. I’m chomping at the bit to live close to cool things. We’ve had to get in the truck nearly every day the past five years to drive miles and miles to get anywhere. No more. 

The coolest thing we’ll be close to is OUR FRIEND DOUG! He’s just a nine-minute walk away—or a three-minute walk if we decide to meet at the ice cream place between us. What a good plan for retirement level 2: meeting an old friend for ice cream any time we want.  

Caveat # whatever I’m up to: The house needs work. At some point in its 101-year history, it was converted to apartments, and the conversion back to a single family house left odd apartment remnants. Plus, of course, we want to make it our own.  

Okay, I’ve already said too much considering we’re hanging on the brink with both the Airstream and the house. This is the story of that brink, I guess. But, very soon, we hope to be on the other side.