Pecan Trees to Pickleball

Simmons and Katie followed The Brothers Johnson route about a month mater with their own leisurely vacation-like trip to WA.  With the dogs.  And a U-haul trailer. Where Sam and I had to deal with a finicky moving truck, Simmons and Katie had to wrangle two dogs who had logged exactly zero hours on the road to date.  Dog tranquilizers made frequent appearances along the way. I am told that some of them actually went to the dogs. Whatever it takes.  This trip went smoother than the first by all accounts. So smooth there was enough time and energy to make a couple of side trips along the way.

The Brothers Johnson head northwest. Day 1 of the drive was to begin early on a Saturday morning in April.  The trouble began, however, on Day 0. I had reserved a 22' Penske box truck for our part of the move, planning to take all of the breakable stuff and lots of garage/barn/yard tools as well as most of our clothes (because who better to entrust Simmons' finest for a cross-country adventure than two guys who had never done anything like it). I picked up the truck on Friday morning.  The plan was to spend all day packing and be fresh and ready to ride when the sun came up Saturday morning.  So after arriving home with the truck on Friday morning, we packed about half of the load that included the things in our garage we intended to move.  On our way to our storage unit to pick up the rest of our load, Simmons noticed that one of the brake lights was out on the truck. A brake light.  Pop in a new bulb and get on our way, right? RIGHT? Uh, no. It turns out that ...

The physical move from Dallas was every bit the logistical headache you might expect, with a healthy dose of interstate highway drama thrown in. The rough plan went like this: 1. My recently acquired Ford F150, purchased in Dallas, is to be put on a car hauler and delivered from Dallas to Seattle sometime in mid March to ensure that I actually have a vehicle on hand when Sam and I arrive the next month 2. I drive a moving truck (22 foot Penske) with some of our stuff, including all the breakable items, sometime in mid-April, with Sam riding shotgun 3. Simmons and Katie (and the two dogs) drive her car, with a small UHaul trailer sometime in mid-May 4. Our Airstream is to be delivered to our property -- no way I'm pulling that beast -- in late April (one week after Sam and I arrive in step 1)

In Dallas, I drove a Chevrolet Bolt, an all-electric vehicle.  That wasn't gonna work in Washington, in part due to the month or so it would take to drive it from Dallas, what with all the stopping to recharge the battery for about 8 hours a shot.  Having a truck was going to be a little more practical as well given the 'former Christmas tree farm' status of our property. My plan was to sell the Bolt around the same time we left Dallas and buy a new hybrid Ford F-150 (with an onboard generator capable of powering our Airstream in a pinch), either off of a lot in Washington or ordered from Ford to have delivered to a dealer in Washington.  Ever since Covid, F150s, as well as most other vehicles, became almost impossible to find. So I resorted to custom ordering a new 2022 F150 in May 2022 in high hopes that it could be delivered to Washington by August or September, since that was our original target date for the move. That custom order wasn't actually processed by Ford ...

We decided early on to make the move from Dallas to Washington before the new house was built.  It was just too much to manage all of the construction issues and decisions from afar. The question then turned to where exactly we would live while the house was being built.  We learned real quick that the apartment or house rental option would probably add somewhere in the neighborhood of $3500/month to our expenses.  Finding a property with a fenced yard (for the dogs) would be even more expensive.   We toyed with the idea of putting some sort of RV or trailer on our property for us to live in, but the hurdle to overcome with that idea was the lack of any useful internet options.  Our house site is so far from the main road that we have never gotten a commitment from any of the local internet providers to run the necessary cables to support their service. About a year before we ultimately made the move, I had signed up for the waiting list for the new Starlin...

June 2019.  Our property is covered in trees.  Some native, but many more were planted by Jim and Helen (the previous owners).  They operated a Christmas tree farm here for several years. Over time, as many trees have been felled, tree stumps became more of a problem, primarily for the hazards posed to our brand new mower. So we rented a stump grinder, a clumsy and beastly type of equipment designed to essentially just scrape all remnants of a tree stump out of existence. With the stump grinder, as with our mower, I couldn't keep Simmons off of it. All told, about 150 stumps wiped out in a week of grinder time.

[Guarding the mower...] One of our early dilemmas was how to keep our land mowed during those years before we could make the move from Dallas to Stanwood. We worked out a deal with one of closest new neighbors and all-around great people: Don and Michelle. They live on a nearby piece of land, recently moving into the farmhouse previously owned by the same folks, Jim and Helen, who sold us our property. The deal was that Don would use our new mower to mow his property and in return he would keep ours mowed as well. Not really sure what we might have done otherwise.  Thanks Don and Michelle!  But on our occasional trips to WA during this time, Simmons always got her chance behind the wheel...

Early 2019: Step one involved getting electricity to the property so we could have a shop built to house our new toys.  A Honda UTV and a 60" zero turn mower to deal with 10 acres of trees, grass, weeds, and wild blackberry. Getting electricity included having a trench dug about 2000 feet from the main road to our property.  Getting the shop (actually a barn to everyone except for the county inspectors who have even more rules about barns than other construction...) built involved our introduction to the wild world of wetlands and land disturbance permits.

In the summer of 2017 we bought some land outside of Stanwood, a small and unremarkable (except to those in the know, of course) town in Northwest Washington.  This piece of land that was once a Christmas tree farm would be the site of our retirement home. Our plan was to leave the big city for a slower life, ultimately trading in our corporate jobs for retirement years filled with maintaining 10 acres within spittin' distance of the Puget Sound.  Maybe a little fishing along the way.  And, as it turns out, a little pickleball. So far, the story is not so strange.  Lots of folks, it seems, make the same decision every day, moving from the growing chaos of the big cities up and down the west coast along I5 to an area with a little more tranquility and a lot less traffic.  Not nearly as common is the tale of a couple of native Texans making the same move. This is their story. Future homesite in the foreground, Port Susan in the background.