Mary and I went to Portland and Denver to get a feel if either would be a place we might consider moving to. As we get older living in the Michigan snow belt has it’s drawbacks and we would like to get someplace with slightly easier winters and more sun. But it needs to be near a major airport (O’hare and Detroit Metro are just a little too far away), we need to be able to have a lot at least as big as our current one and there are a bunch of other tings that come and go on the list depending what day it is. Portland is a great city and meets all the requirements except sun, lot size and affordability. Because it is in a river valley the housing all sits on top of each other and the lots are small, even out from the city in the suburbs. But it does have the world famous Voodoo Donuts.
Famous enough that some people apparently spent a HUGE amount of time there. They got the famous chop suey place.
We drove around and looked a some house locations and decided that the selection was not quite what we were looking for so we drove the hour and half to get to the ocean, not that we planed to move there but just because we could. We drove out onto the beach to look around.
And stand in the Pacific Ocean.
Randi had flown out and Chris came down from Seattle so they were also in Portland for a couple days as evidenced here looking at the big bridge in the downtown city river park.
Portland has a big river and a bunch of bridges.
The Portland part of the trip came to and end (as did my laptop drive bring to an end of my ability to do anything digital) and it was off to Denver.
Denver was more of the same, driving around looking at areas and evaluating the city. Took a short trip into the mountains and stopped along the side of the road at the stream that ultimately runs into Golden, so I guess you can drink beer out of it.
In Golden that river has fish statues, if a fish statue is in fact a statue.
While Denver is a nice place and Golden area was nice as was some areas South of Denver it still had more negatives that we thought we needed. So our search continues, maybe Long Island. We got home Thursday night and had one day to get ready to leave Saturday morning for 5 weeks in China. This included prepping a new laptop (that didn’t get loaded with all the files needed) getting suitcases repacked, mowing lawn and doing house preparations (but not apparently running the dishwasher load of our dirty dishes so they set for 5 weeks), doing end of month business accounting and generally too much stuff to do in that short of a period. But it was off to China.