We rented an apartment today, and we finally have a land address after being without one for the past month. For those of you who care, our new address is: 128 Heritage Place #117, Burlington WA 98233. When we arrived, we drove into Bellingham to discover it full of people! Can you imagine? This is actually a city of 200,000 people. I'm afraid that Bastrop spoiled us to the small town life. Burlington is 25 miles south of Bellingham and is in a cluster of small towns. It's between Sedro Woolley (yes, that's really the name of a town), and Anacortes (where there's a ferry). Ferry access is rather important in this part of the country. Plus, we wanted to have relatively quick access to the Olympic Penninsula. Burlington has about 10,000 people, with another 10,000 scattered throughout the county.
We haven't let any grass grow under our feet. I already have a library card; they have a brand new 20,000 square foot library. Next, we found the Senior Center because Drake wants to get his bridge game set up. (They play every Friday.) Plus, we discovered they have a hot lunch every day for $3. I found a thrift store - remember, I said I wasn't eating on a card table anymore - well, I'm not. I bought a wooden table and two chairs ($60 - not quite St. Paul garage sale prices, but close). It will be so much better for sewing, and I can set up a computer permanently on the card table. I'll Craiglist the table and chairs when we get ready to leave. We even went to play blackjack for an hour today at the Indian casino 5 miles north of Burlington.
The new apartment is ground floor, 2/2 with covered parking, pool, hot tub, exercise room - pretty standard stuff, but Drake was happy to match the Bastrop apartment price. We arrived here on Monday evening and we will move into the apartment on Saturday. It took us 2 days to find a place that met most of our criteria, and 20 minutes for them to 'approve' us. Wasn't that a big surprise. I'm waiting an extra day to move in because they are cleaning the carpet today, and I want it to be thoroughly dry. Oddly, the fridge doesn't have an ice maker. I thought that was weird. However, they do have recycling at the apartment - recycling is mandatory in Washington.
Even stranger for us is that NOTHING up here is air conditioned. We didn't see a single place to live that had air conditioning. A lot of the small individually owned stores don't have AC either. There's been a lot of bitching up here today since it was 91. Everyone is very, very unhappy. The weather is going to moderate beginning tomorrow (83 for a high), and then for the next 10 days, the temperature is going to be 72/55 - and no rain at all. I know everyone in Texas is moaning or cursing. I'm going to enjoy every minute of it. I'm sure my autumn will also be a new experience weatherwise.
We'll be here until November 30th. This silly apartment complex won't prorate the rent on the month you move out. We originally wanted to leave the first or second week of December, but we would have had to pay the entire month's rent for December. I don't think we'll be doing that, so after we eat turkey, we'll pack up and leave. This will give us a leisurely trip down the west coast and we'll turn left at Death Valley to get to Arizona in time for Christmas.
Stay tuned for a play by play description of Washington State and Canada. It's going to be a ball.
3 comments:
Terry and I got married in Austin on August 5th...left the 6th and got up there 3 days later...the first thing I looked for was an air conditioner. That was almost our first fight! How dare he find something without air conditioning! He swore we wouldn't need it...I think it took me til the next summer to actually believe him! You will love the fall...minus the rain!
Jan, I am so excited for you and Drake to be traveling around and having a great time. Wish Jack and I could do that but afraid it is to late to do that now. We should have started when we retired, we had a nice sum of money then and also had good health. So much for that. So
I will just continue to enjoy reading your experiences. Thanks and good luck to you both.
No air conditioning here either! And it gets warmer than you would think, especially on the sunny days! The sun shines all day and all night at the moment so I have purchased a total of three fans and we have them going all the time when we are home. Yesterday it was almost 80 degrees, but then about 7pm the rain started again. No recycling in AK. Weird huh? They take really good care of everything and keep the state really clean - but recycling is scarce for some reason.
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