Mission Accomplished!

In spite of our impossibly tight schedule of seeing 11 apartments in 1.5 days both in Virginia and Maryland, we were able to find a great place for a great price (relatively speaking) in Alexandria, VA.  We were all exhausted by the end of the trip, but knowing we'll be in an interesting location made me want to hang the same ' Mission Accomplished' banner on our plane that George W did from the aircraft carrier and collapse into three days worth of sleep.

 Lincoln Memorial from the base of the Washington Monument

After doing most of the research for this trip, I wasn't sure we would find anything for a suitable price that would be safe for a five-month-old and a couple of adults fresh out of North Dakota.  Let's talk about prices.  You can get a two-bedroom apartment for as low as $1200 in the suburbs of DC, however, according to apartmentratings.com these come complete with roaches, pimps, and crack dealers.  When you start talking about places you actually want to live, you've gone into the $1350 and higher range.  Forget paying less than that unless you want to have 8 roommates.

We saw a variety of places, from townhomes to highrises and ended up with a condo-style apartment on the second floor with a balcony view of Old Town Alexandria and some trees in the distance (yes, there is nature there)!  The apartment size is fairly small, but will help us with our purging and includes a nice fitness center and washer and dryer so I can continue to easily outfit Alison with cloth diapers.  There's a grocery store, Red Lobster, Italian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Afghan, and Salvadorean restaurants just around the corner.  There is also a Whole Foods a short drive away.

Our new building!

Now, let's talk about traffic.  Did we rent a GPS for $10.99/day?  Yes.  Was it the best $33 I've ever spent?  YES!  Everything you've heard about DC traffic is true.  We made two wrong turns.  One resulted in it taking an extra 45 minutes to go about a mile and the other resulted in us getting routed down the entire length of Connecticut Ave during morning rush hour.  Nathan did an excellent job of navigating the three-lane roundabouts.  Paris driving, here we come!

 View of the White House and DC from the Washington Monument

I can't tell you how much I love being in DC.  The wrong turn we took on our way to Maryland made us drive past the National Mall and Lincoln Memorial.  Oh darn.  We also visited Nathan's new office and got an unexpected behind-the-scenes tour of the Washington Monument for free.

 Family Photo in front of the Washington Monument

We arrive near the end of February.  I'm excited to have all of my stuff in one place and excited to start a new life here.  I feel like a pilgrim embarking on a journey to the Land of Opportunity.  Luckily the only Indian we need to worry about is the digestive stress caused by the restaurant down the street.  Watch out world, the Kings are coming to Washington. 

We're Moving to DC

For the entire time that I've had this blog, there's always uncertainty in our lives surrounding where Nathan and I will be in the next few months.  My Myers-Briggs score is certain of only one thing and that's that I'm a J - a major planner, but Nathan's willy-nilly schedule as a Park Ranger has forced me to relax and go with the flow.  I've gotten quite good at adjusting to whatever comes our way and have loved almost every place we've been - Glacier, Theodore Roosevelt, Pipestone, Tanzania - all very good.  Then Alison arrived and suddenly a little more structure in our lives seemed welcome.

Well, we're getting it!  Nathan has been offered a full-time, year-round GS 5-7-9 position on the National Mall in Washington DC.  If you told me a few years ago that I'd be moving to DC, I might have gotten really angry.  However, our trip to visit Nathan's brother, Justin, proved my horribly-crime-ridden-and-a-slippery-politician-on-every-corner impression wrong and I had declared in a previous blog, "I think I could live here"!

October 2009 - Yes, we're not wearing jackets in October!

 There are a lot of reasons I'm excited to be in DC: closer to family, farmer's markets galore, cheaper travel, and people that think like they're from Madison.  The best part is all of the interesting people and organizations working their butts off to make this world a better place.  Now, more often than not when I hear about the latest renewable energy conference or Sierra Club event, guess where it is?  My new backyard.

We're flying out next week to find an apartment and will be there permanently by February 28th.  I'll miss the wide open spaces of North Dakota, but am excited to explore the East Coast!