Weezie

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.

Texts From A Cousin

We still have a flip phone (GASP!) and we will on occasion text someone as long as we keep it short. My snowbird cousin has a fine little iPhone and texts up a storm. Louise has just gotten to Florida for her couple of months of avoiding winter and Donna texted her the other day:

Feeling better? How are the B&B. A&F 1

Louise texted back a reply:

an. He is a
macrobiotic chef
and she imports and
sells clothes from

India so they are
very interesting…
But I feel like
throwing a c

Feeling much
better. Air BnB is
fine. The owners
are French and Veg

ds. How are you
doing?
Mild winter?
A&F Weeze

e steak when I
go out? going ove
r to West coast
today to see frien

hicken part on his
cutting board is
not the way to go
so I order th

For whatever reason her texts always gets broken down into mysterious haiku-like tidbits that arrive out of order. We have to go to Verizon’s web site to read the messages where the above six texts can be seen in the proper order:

Feeling much better. Air BnB is fine. The owners are French and Vegan. He is a macrobiotic chef and she imports and sells clothes from India so they are very interesting… But I feel like throwing a chicken part on his cutting board is not the way to go so I order the steak when I go out? going over to West coast today to see friends. How are you doing? Mild winter? A&F Weeze2

Covey of Cousins

You met my cousin Louise, the woman on the left, back in January when she passed through South Carolina on her way to Florida. The woman on the right is Martha, AKA Muffy, the other half of my known universe of first cousins.

Muffy is down in Florida visiting her sister, so we all met at Donna’s sister’s house. Friday evening we got together for dinner and drinks and then again on Saturday for more food and story telling. Both of my cousins are a few year older than I, so it was interesting to get their perspective of my parents from their visiting them before I was old enough to actually form memories.

To add interest to my miniature family gathering, there were Canadian cousins from Donna’s side passing through for lunch and a visit today between their cruise return and Mouse World. Two of them, John & Margret, we had met before, last September at the Gatlingburg Gathering. With them were their two kids, their respective significant others, plus two point five grand kids.

Fledgling Snowbird

Dad was an only child and Mom had one sister, so the sum total of my first cousins is quite small. The woman on the right in the photo above represents exactly one half of them, meet Cousin Louise, fledgling snowbird.

When we received her annual Christmas letter this year she mentioned that she was tired of the winters in Maine, so she was going to rent a house in Florida from a friend for the months of January, February and March. She had gotten her nurse’s license for FLA and planned on finding some work to keep her kind of busy and recoup some of her rent money. Turns out the town she was renting in was a mere 15 miles from where Donna’s sister Sandy lives, so we told her we were going down in February to visit Sandy and some of Donna and her cousins when they returned from a cruise* and we would stop in and visit. We also offered up a free night of room and board at Casa de Bogardus if her drive down brought her our way.

*Maybe we should check on those plans, as they may have decided on something different after the Costa Concordia thing.

And at the beginning Louise was going to pass right by here as she traveled from Virginia Beach to Atlanta visiting friends, but when we checked in with her the day before her scheduled arrival, she mentioned that she was getting anxious to get to her destination and was going to keep the car pointed south instead of jogging west our way. Seeing as she was going to have to pass right through South Carolina on the way. We plotted a likely point for her overnight stay on Friday and because we had that afternoon off we’d drive over and meet her for dinner.

Serendipitously, it turned out to be a town that we are intimately familiar with meeting cousins in. It is the same city where we usually meet Donna’s cousin Laurie at a Cracker Barrel in Florence, SC. So we made some reservations at a hotel that fit our one important criteria, be within walking distance of a restaurant that served wine. We each agreed to ask at the front desk to see if the other had checked in yet so we could get together.

Donna and I took our time on the way east on I-20 doing a few a few park & grab geocaches. When we got to the hotel I told Donna we would first circle the lot looking for a car with Maine plates before checking in. We didn’t get very far, there was a red Toyota Prius under the entrance awning. We did some catching up, then a lot more family stories over dinner. There was a bit more chatting at breakfast on Saturday in the hotel before Louise continued flying south for the winter and we geocached home vowing to meet again in February.