Would I even be me if I didn’t have 17 blogs with 3 entries each?

TLDR:

Got to Portland, moved into a basement apartment with many quirks but a lot of space, got laid off from my job 10 days before Christmas, wrecked my knee, got and started a new job, ended up staying in Portland 3 months total.

In mid-March, we drove two days to Longmont, Colorado.  Two months there, late winter turning into Spring. We went camping – I finally collected a Bald Eagle – in some challenging winds.  Friends came to visit and we hit Rocky Mountain National Park for a day, plus a stop at the Stanley Hotel to get souvenirs while their car charged.  My knee slowly got better.

In mid-May we drove two days to Milwaukee, where we were staying just a few minutes from old friends.  They took us to Door County for a weekend, they introduced us to Supper Clubs and Old Fashioneds and Fish Fry Friday.  Sadly, I did not extend that reservation in time and so we ended up moving out to Racine – closer to the lake, but closer to an hour from our friends – for another round, which is where we are now.

We’d been booked in through 8/6 here, and disinclined to extend because the upstairs neighbors are profoundly noisy and we don’t have any outdoor space here to enjoy in our usual fashion.  We finally decided on our next stop and I booked a place in the Catskills, in upstate NY.

Which cancelled on us yesterday because their well failed.

I’ll write up a whole post on our reservation strategy and my observations from the past year, but in brief: long-term stays are a much lower hit-rate than short, because they often have future bookings that mean there’s not 6-8 weeks free all together for a booking.  Once I’ve whittled down to a choice, 2nd place is often a distant 2nd, and if something falls through after a day or two everything you looked at previously is probably not viable anymore.  Booking is kinda a fun chore, I mean I enjoy the snooping process, but it’s always a little nerve-wracking settling on something and making the payment.  Doing it twice just sucks, but I also accept this is just an unavoidable aspect of our current lifestyle choices.

So back to the drawing board we went, securing a place in Albany that ticks almost all our boxes and is a safer hedge on internet speeds than the more rural places we were looking at.  It’s got a cute yard with two separate decks and a fire pit area, so at least we’ll get out Outdoors Time fix.

We have another month to enjoy Wisconsin, and maybe get in one more camping trip (after bailing on one a few weeks ago due to Unhealthy air quality).