The month of May saw us traveling, quite a bit, it feels like. The first of May saw us in Tulsa, OK where we saw Truman’s grandmother for the last time before she went up to live in Nova Scotia. She’s going to be living in the beautiful old house that his mother and step-father own that we stayed in last summer for a month. I’m not going to lie, there’s a decent bit of jealousy there! That house is truly my dream house, set in a dreamy location. (Lots of water right there, on enough land to do fun things, a fabulous little town with a great many wonderful people in it. Close enough to a larger town (Truro, NS) that it wasn’t totally isolated. Perfect!)
Then toward the middle of May, my grandmother and I took a road trip with the kids up to Niagara, WI to look at a house. It turned out that we actually qualified for a USDA rural development home loan, and we initially thought this house was perfect. Well, the house ended up needing more work than anticipated. A lot more work than anticipated. It was situated on 10 acres and basically snuggled up against the border of the Upper Peninsula. In any case, the house didn’t work out. But we’ve decided that we’re going to move to Wisconsin in August anyway, and for the first year or so, we’re just going to find a nice little rental home somewhere in the Wausau/Marshfield area while we figure out just where exactly it is we want or need to be.
At the park in Iron Mountain, MI (which was just on the other side of the Menominee River from where the house we were looking at was) the kids were enthralled. There were tons of semi-tamed wild rabbits, a large deer enclosure, Bocce ball courts, more bicycling paths than you could shake a stick at, and more. Truly, it was a great area, and this park was fabulous.
I didn’t get much of a chance to take photos of much of the rest of the trip – I was the one who did all of the driving, and I regret now that we didn’t do much sightseeing.
On our way back home from Wisconsin, we stopped in a little park on the south side of Madison, which met up with the Ice Age National Scenic Trail. We stopped there and had a picnic lunch while the kids played. It was an awesome little park as well. The general feel I’ve gotten is that Wisconsin really likes their parks! Which is awesome, because I really like having nice parks, too.
I can’t wait until we’re back in Wisconsin on a more permanent basis! It reminded me a lot of Nova Scotia, with how green it all was. The north eastern part of Wisconsin, up by the Upper Peninsula, made me think of how the wooded areas felt around the New Glasgow area. In short: perfect and beautiful!