On The Road Again

For as much grief as I've given Kansas, arriving back to it, with all of its familiar sites, was nice.  I guess a small piece of me was fond of it afterall, or maybe the spring weather just brings you a sense of endless possibilities, no matter where you are.  However, we had a job to do there and here's what we were up against:

Our storage unit - 1/4th excavated

Mom and Dad came down and helped us sift through this junk and get it moved onto a U-Haul.  We will forever be grateful for their help with this move as we have no idea what we would have done without them!  Spending a week in the car and trying to sleep in the same room as a six-month-old is not considered traveling in the lap of luxury.

2-19-11 - Early-morning wake-up call for Grandpa

Kevin and George, coworkers from Fort Larned, also win the  "best surprise help" award as they helped us haul off a bunch of the things we couldn't take and made sure everything was packed into the truck a day early.  Wow!

On Saturday, we drove to Independence, MO, home of the Harry S Truman National Historic Site.  Nathan and I were almost late for the 9am Sunday tour of Truman's Mother-In-Law's house (coincidentally, he lived much of his life there and never purchased his own home), but Nathan mentioned where he worked and they made sure we got a spot on the tour!  Ah, the benefits of knowing a Park Ranger.

President Truman's House

Later Sunday, we also stopped in St. Louis and I made everyone tour the Old Courthouse and see the Arch (a.k.a. Jefferson National Expansion Memorial).  We didn't go up to the top, but I was OK with that when I heard that it sways in the slightest of breezes!

The Arch

On our third day we ended up driving just below a giant snow and ice storm, escaping horrible weather, but getting drenched the entire drive.  The fourth day, we made it to my sister, Samantha's, new house and got to meet her boa constrictor and street cats.  We did eventually make it down to our new place in Alexandria, VA.  I haven't seen any snow since because the weather has been in the 50's (at least) and the streets are made of cheese.  Just kidding, I will have the full report on our first impressions (good and bad) soon.

Farewell Dakotas

The epic journey has begun and instead of starting with a single step, we decided to start with an 8.5-hour drive from Medora, ND to North Platte, NE.  This was the single longest drive of the entire trip and it took Alison and I a mere 12.5 hours to complete.  Did we bite off more than we could chew?  Of course!  Will we make that mistake again?  Nope...not with a 5.5-month-old, anyway.

On Tuesday, the weather in North Dakota had warmed to 50 degrees as if to convince us that Medora was not as inhospitable as we might believe and that maybe we should stay a while longer.  We can't, but we did enter the park to say good-bye and were met with a plethora of bison and gorgeous sun-drenched bluffs.

 2-15-11 - I'm not as quick to shed my jacket in this gorgeous spring weather as Alison was

2-15-11 - Bison: Best viewed from the car

Keeping a baby sane for 12.5 hours is not easy.  Luckily, we took a route through Rapid City, which allowed me to show Alison the ultimate tourist trap: Wall Drug.

 2-16-11 - Wall Drug!

We made it to North Platte safe and sound, despite driving several hours through the dark Nebraska wilderness in what can only be described as prime alien abduction country.  We'll miss the Dakotas dearly, our home for the past four winters, but are very excited to see what lies ahead in this strange, new Eastern land.

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!

And They Call This Progress

I couldn't have explained this better myself.  Check out Nathan's blog for a report on what's new in Medora.

Not In Kansas Anymore

Last weekend, Nathan, Alison, and I moved from Larned, KS to Medora, ND for the winter.  I must admit I am a little relieved because the truth is, I didn't like Kansas. 

Now, to be fair to the state, I'm sure the cities are very different from where we lived.  I'd visited Hays, Salina,  Hutchinson, Wichita, and Topeka.  All of those looked like lovely places to live with things to do and a more neutral political scene.  I, however, landed in rural South-Central Kansas, expecting my preconceived notions about the state (formed mostly through the media, I suspect) to be completely wrong and pictured myself happily blogging about what life is really like in Kansas.  Instead, I found the stereotype to be scarily, dead-right.  While I discovered that Kansas is not the place for me, that doesn't mean that the people there don't love it and aren't great people.  They really are, I just discovered a lot about myself while there and have different feelings about how I want to live.

 Larned Sidewalk Fail

What I loved about Kansas:

1. The fall and spring weather!  When we arrived in May, there were almost daily, spectacular thunderstorms.  They were amazing and as long as my house stayed standing, I enjoyed them.  The fall is the BEST time of year in Kansas.  We had 70-degree weather right into November.  Allie and I got to take walks everyday and I'm thankful we were able to do that so long.
2. Living close to my Aunt, Uncle, and Cousins: the Lyttons.  I've never lived in the same state as anyone I'm related to and being able to drive an hour to go watch my cousin cheerlead or visit my Aunt & Uncle in Salina was awesome!  I will miss that.
3. You can always find a parking spot and it's always free.  I didn't have to stand in line at the DMV.
4. There is a great sense of community and communities banding together can accomplish a lot.  Just read about the community movie theater in Larned.  That was quality.

What I hated about Kansas:

1. Food & Water Health:  Dirty Food and Dirty Water.  Call me a hippie, but I don't like to drink water laden with pesticides and I'd really like to support locally grown, organic food. 
   
   When you're in the middle of feedlot country, you don't find a lot of farmers trying to work sustainably or an infrastructure that supports sustainability.  Sure, Great Bend had a Farmer's Market three times a week, but it was mainly people bringing excess food from their gardens, not farmers.  Most of that wasn't grown organically, and only one vendor sold grass-fed beef and chicken.  For that, you had to travel two hours to get your meat once or twice a year.  Sure, Rochester and Madison have spoiled me, but I shouldn't have to drive hours to find healthy food for my family.  No one should. 
   
   I was excited that we had the Pawnee Fork of the Arkansas River so close to us, but when I asked whether they have a lot of kayakers/canoers around, I was told, "Ew! Gross!  I wouldn't go near that water."  Because of all the farming, the river is loaded with pesticides and the local water supply for drinking is too.  You are basically required to have a filter in your kitchen, otherwise you're asking for trouble.
2. It literally smells like sh*t.  There was a feedlot on the other side of town and it's windy.  Enough said.
3. Housing: Kansas and I definitely got off to a bad start after a string of unfortunate events which you can read about here.  The rental market is horrific in Larned and we actually got a deal renting a place from Nathan's co-worker.  While I'm very thankful for them letting us live there, we were pretty much forced to move out before Allie became mobile because it would have been a small child death trap.  Nathan had taken a look at a few other places in Great Bend and declared them worse.  We've also had visitors from the local area who thought our place looked "great".  That just goes to show you that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and I for one would like to live in a place that could pass a housing inspection.
4. No one has an up-to-date website.  Calling to get information such as store hours is fine, but it's tough to figure out what's going on in town if it's not published anywhere and that brings me to my next point.
5. If you're not related to anyone in town, you're deemed an outsider and it's pretty hard to become integrated or even to know what's going on.
6. There are no indoor pools.  I'm a swimmer and I would have liked to start Alison in swim lessons over the winter.  That just isn't an option near Larned.
7. Summer weather tops 100 degrees starting in May.  I definitely prefer the Northern temps.
8. Politics:  I understand why most people are Republicans down there.  They don't want to pay money to the government because they don't see a lot of help from the government except for great roads, schools, libraries, emergency facilities, flight for life, health department that offers most services like immunizations for free, parental education, subsidies for the local hospital, subsidies for the local humane society, subsidies for housing, subsidies for medicare, subsidies for local businesses, unemployment, FARM SUBSIDIES, jobs for government workers...wait...why are people so mad at the government?  One of the reasons we couldn't find a place to live is that all of the apartment buildings that weren't for seniors in town were only for low income families (subsidized by the government).  People don't want to pay the government, but yet most are getting some kind of regular check from the government.  This happens in other places too, but those in Larned seemed to not realize that the very entity that helps them live a better life is the one they are trying so desperately to shrink. 

There is more, but why go on?  Kansas isn't horrible, it just isn't for me.  We may end up back there next summer and if we go, I will be focusing on the "Things I Loved" and not the second list.  For now, I'm happy to be back in Medora with a beautiful park, where the air smells fresh, and the postmaster knows my name.

Discrimination, Homesteading, & Goats in the Heartland

This weekend, we traveled to Lincoln and Omaha to introduce Alison to half of her extended family.  The trip was excellent and Alison did a great job!

I also had a lot of fun visiting two smaller National Park Service sites: Brown vs. Board of Education and Homestead.  Brown vs. Board is located in an old school building in Topeka, KS.  They have some excellent multi-media displays that discuss discrimination of all kinds from the 1600's to present.  It served to remind me of how far we've come, but also how recently we've really changed as a country with respect to civil rights.  It also gave me some hope that the discrimination we see today (LGBT rights, religious beliefs, and racial tensions) may someday be a thing of the past as well.

 Brown vs. Board of Education National Historic Site

Photo: Nathan King

Homestead National Monument celebrates the very first 160-acre farm patent issued by the Homestead Act of 1862.  This is the legislation that allowed you to stake out a claim in the vast openness of the United States, live on the land, and eventually be given that land for free.  Seems like a good, non-controversial idea, right?  Wrong!  The very interesting video and displays in the museum did a good job of pointing out how this affected the native populations.  It was also a pretty difficult thing to do as 60% of the families who initially staked claims, never proved up on the land (i.e. stayed long enough to take ownership of their farm).  The best part of this site is the beautiful prairie outside and the brochure and demonstration area about all of the different kinds of barbed wire.  Wow!  My life would NOT have been complete without this knowledge.

An example of 1 of the 500 types of barbed wire

On our trip, Kansas and Nebraska were being, well, Kansas and Nebraska by giving us major crosswinds to contend with on the drive up, allowing tumbleweeds and corn husks to collect in the bumper. On the way home we saw not one, but two trucks carrying goats.

Not that I don't find this hilarious, but I am really looking forward to moving to North Dakota later this month.  That's right, braving perilous snowdrifts sounds more fun than hanging out alone in Larned.  Go figure!

 Photo of a Homestead in North Dakota

Photo: Nathan King