Why Are You In Oregon?
The title of this post comes from the sentiment my cousin Louise (AKA: Weezie) wrote on the envelope of her Christmas card to us. And for good measure repeated inside the card as well. Donna has said she is going to write her a note explaining our relocation, but has been putting it off for the last week or 10 days, so I’m going to write the reason down here, maybe spurring her into doing it in that card.
For more than the past dozen years, in nearly every one of those summers, we have taken a 2 week vacation to come out west. One of those weeks has been dedicated to visit Donna’s youngest brother and his fledgling family. The first year it was to attend the baby shower for he and Beth’s first child. Along the way James has been joined by two subsequent sisters and this year that number one child will be getting his driver’s learner permit. Yikes!
The other vacation week has been to explore western America, just the two of us. Mostly Washington and Oregon, but we’ve been through a bit of California, Nevada, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico. The desert southwest, while stunningly beautiful in its own way, didn’t hold a candle to the Pacific Northwest’s appeal to us. So this is where we visited more than anywhere else. We spent time on the Olympic Peninsula, in the San Juan Islands, central Washington, the Cascade Mountains and the Oregon coast. Every time we returned from one of forays out here we would come back, look at each other and say, “We need to move out there.” After 2017’s western trip we started seriously considering a move away from our home of 30 years, Aiken, SC.
We started with a couple criteria for our new home, 1) a small, but not too small, town, 2) was nowhere too close to the big cities of Seattle or Portland and 3) be close, but not too close to brother and family. We used started by looking in Washington state and the first serious contender was the town of Sequim (pronounced skwim) on the Olympic Peninsula. It was less than 100 miles to the Morrison Manse in Granite Falls, but took over two hours to get there because it involved two ferry rides. The ferry rides were actually a big plus for us though, as we always managed to get in several on every visit out that way, we enjoyed them so much. When we started home shopping on Zillow in our price range it was apparent that, even in a small town of just 6,000 souls, that that money wasn’t nearly enough to put us in something nowhere as nice as we are used to.
Our 2018 trip out west was to Lake Tahoe for a wedding, because we were both retired at that point, we drove and took our time. When we got back to South Carolina we were now more determined than ever to move out west. The leading contender had become Carson City, Nevada because we enjoyed ourselves there one weekend day visit. But when we started looking at houses on Zillow it had the same cost problem as Sequim.
I then made a spreadsheet of towns in several western states with some specific criteria, population of 25 to 40 thousand, altitude of a minimum of 2500′, fairly temperate (not as hot as Aiken, but not too much lower than there in the winter) and more sunny days than cloudy, plus the big one -housing affordability. The field was quickly narrowed down to one city, Klamath Falls, Oregon. We searched around the internet as best we could to look the place over, from afar it did look like a winner. We started virtually stalking house on Zillow and were pleasantly surprised with what we found.
Our trip out west for 2019 was now set, one week for visiting family in Washington and the other in Klamath Falls. We picked the last week in June for Oregon because there were lots of events scheduled for then and that left the 4th of July week to visit Granite Falls. We had an AirBnB for a week in Klamath and wandered around town, enjoyed several car related events, ate at a few local restaurants, did some geocaching and even had a realtor show us 4 homes that we had chosen from Zillow. We both agreed, we could live there.
We returned to Aiken on July 10th, we put our house on the market July 29th, we agreed on selling the house September 9th, we closed on it on October 11th and started driving to Oregon on the next day.
