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Best Wishes
phandly
Jul 24, 2017
Oct 16, 2016
San Diego Day and Night
"A little sea-bathing would set me up forever," wrote Jane Austen. Living the life by the sea in California.
What to do after traveling the world and moving to the California oceanside? Write a zombie book!
YYou never know where life may lead you! Right now it's led me to writing a fun, adventurous zombie book about a scientist, name Melanie Harmon, her daughter, Kelsey, and four other teens who have to battle through Seattle to safe refuge! So excited for the book to come out!!!
Keep your eyes open for, "The Bite."
Aug 2, 2014
It all starts with U-Haul
Do the difficult things while they are easy and do the great things while they are small. A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
Once we had decided to make the move, our task list suddenly became massive. So following the advice of ol' Lau Tsu, we just got started. First thing was the sell or rent decision on our Falls Church home. This was harder than it seemed, but ultimately calmer, pragmatic heads prevailed and we decided to rent on both coasts. To find a property we first turned to Zillow because of its ease of use and it's price. Zillow works well, but we ultimately downloaded our own copy of the Realtor.com app based on the recommendation of our friend and national real estate trends guru Jonathan Smoke. Shameless plugs aside, we used the inter webs to find our new pad in 4S Ranch San Diego and by all appearances it worked! I say by all appearances because even though we've signed on the dotted line, dolled out some serious cash and shipped all our worldly belongings to California, we've never actually seen the place, much less set foot in it! What could go wrong? But I'm getting ahead of myself, because as usual, it started with U-haul.
Neighbors and friends know that I'm a big fan of the u-haul trailer. In fact, my buddy Chris and I rent trailers from FC U-Haul so often they're considering a frequent renters program for the two of us! Anyway, last trip we used the U-Box pods to pack up and store our "essential" items, so naturally I turned to them again. This time the goal was to box up everything we own, stuff it into pods, ship it west and then unpack what we need when we find a place. That's the key, U-Box is a moving and storage solution wrapped into one, or in our case, eight manageable pods.
Our timing was such that had to decide on a moving/shipping/storage solution before we knew exactly where we were moving to. U-Box proved to be perfect for us because we ultimately had the boxes shipped to the local U-box facility in our part of San Diego where they sit, securely waiting for our arrival. We could use them like storage units out there, but now that we have an address, we'll unpack the lot when we get there.
Once we had decided to make the move, our task list suddenly became massive. So following the advice of ol' Lau Tsu, we just got started. First thing was the sell or rent decision on our Falls Church home. This was harder than it seemed, but ultimately calmer, pragmatic heads prevailed and we decided to rent on both coasts. To find a property we first turned to Zillow because of its ease of use and it's price. Zillow works well, but we ultimately downloaded our own copy of the Realtor.com app based on the recommendation of our friend and national real estate trends guru Jonathan Smoke. Shameless plugs aside, we used the inter webs to find our new pad in 4S Ranch San Diego and by all appearances it worked! I say by all appearances because even though we've signed on the dotted line, dolled out some serious cash and shipped all our worldly belongings to California, we've never actually seen the place, much less set foot in it! What could go wrong? But I'm getting ahead of myself, because as usual, it started with U-haul.
Neighbors and friends know that I'm a big fan of the u-haul trailer. In fact, my buddy Chris and I rent trailers from FC U-Haul so often they're considering a frequent renters program for the two of us! Anyway, last trip we used the U-Box pods to pack up and store our "essential" items, so naturally I turned to them again. This time the goal was to box up everything we own, stuff it into pods, ship it west and then unpack what we need when we find a place. That's the key, U-Box is a moving and storage solution wrapped into one, or in our case, eight manageable pods.
Our timing was such that had to decide on a moving/shipping/storage solution before we knew exactly where we were moving to. U-Box proved to be perfect for us because we ultimately had the boxes shipped to the local U-box facility in our part of San Diego where they sit, securely waiting for our arrival. We could use them like storage units out there, but now that we have an address, we'll unpack the lot when we get there.
Jul 31, 2014
Our next adventure begins - San Diego or Bust!
Head West Young Man is a phrase I've heard and planned to live by most of my adult life. I always intended to follow that advise and explore the western US, but somehow life got in the way.
Returning to the DC area in 1989 after a year abroad I had no idea I'd stay for more than two decades, find my love, raise a family and build a career. But that is exactly what happened and I had no plans to uproot the family to pursue that fading dream. We were so happy in Falls Church City...our roots were growing deep.
But then life got in the way again. Amelia's migraines had gotten so bad over the past few years that she was missing so much school and life that we had to try something. Drugs, diet change and other protocols weren't working. And then my company opened a new office in San Diego and my boss was supportive of the idea of trying a change of environment. So here we go! We've bit the bullet, packed our gear and are headed west.
Returning to the DC area in 1989 after a year abroad I had no idea I'd stay for more than two decades, find my love, raise a family and build a career. But that is exactly what happened and I had no plans to uproot the family to pursue that fading dream. We were so happy in Falls Church City...our roots were growing deep.
But then life got in the way again. Amelia's migraines had gotten so bad over the past few years that she was missing so much school and life that we had to try something. Drugs, diet change and other protocols weren't working. And then my company opened a new office in San Diego and my boss was supportive of the idea of trying a change of environment. So here we go! We've bit the bullet, packed our gear and are headed west.
Mar 25, 2011
Coming Home and Catching Up
March 25, 2011
Hi All,
We've been at home - with little time for reflection jumped right back in to our lives. Why didn't we write earlier - when we first got back to the country we didn't have internet access and as days slipped by so many day to day things seemed to take priority - moving back in - dealing with tons of boxes (we got rid of stuff when we moved out and got rid of even more when we came back!), registering for school, turning on utilities, catching up with friends and traveling within the US to catch up with relatives. Then on to fall sports, scouts, homework, work - time just flew by and it seemed like every day was too late to catch up on our blog but I finally decided it's never too late! Hence the new posts.
We wrote a Christmas letter this year with a summary of our trip and what we've done since coming home.
Here's the link:
https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=explorer&chrome=true&srcid=0ByPdTtRnNAM6NWQxOGEzMjUtMTUzYS00ODcxLWI0MTQtZTM5YmYwNTY0NGZl&hl=en&authkey=CJ_Eu-IP
Wishing you all well,
Jackie
Mar 24, 2011
Laundry Around the World
March 24, 2011
Laundry around the world
How did we do laundry people have asked.
In New Zealand we rented an RV and stayed in campgrounds which all had washing facilities. New Zealand has beautiful campgrounds close to wonderful sites, complete with shared kitchens, bathrooms, hot showers, playground equipment, some with beautiful swimming pools and of course, washers and dryers or lines to dry your things. Doing laundry in New Zealand was easy.
In Australia we did laundry at Youth Hostels (where you can be any age to stay by the way - we stayed with other families and also met traveling retirees). All the Youth Hostels we stayed at had washers and dryers where you put in tokens or change.
In terms of the rest of the world we stayed in short term apartments with washer/dryers; friends homes (thank you for everything - including sharing your washers :o)); in Rome Paul took the laundry on the subway to a laundromat; in the Czech Republic the owner of the short term apartment did our laundry for free (!) in their brand new machines; and a few places we hand washed things in sinks and dried them overnight. In China and in Thailand we brought our things to full service laundry places to be washed as it was so inexpensive. In Australia the detergents are all environmentally sound and while our clothes did get clean when we had them washed in China, not sure what they used, but our whites were really white!!!
In terms of doing our own laundry we packed clothes that were fast drying so you could wash them and they would dry overnight. We sometimes did a little hand washing and would hang things out to dry. In countries with warm weather and low humidity things dried easily overnight - all but China where it was winter - everywhere else it was essentially summer due to the time of year we traveled. Both children did insist on bringing jeans, and, as it was very important to them to bring their jeans and feel comfortable in something they were used to wearing let them bring one pair of jeans each. We all also had one pair of light packing travel pants. It all worked out fine as we could find places to wash clothes often enough and things would dry really fast in the low humidity (unlike the East Coast of the US with its high humidity in the summer). (The one pair of technical fabric pants we each brought could zip-off and become shorts - the technical fabric was great for washing and drying fast and the zip-off portion great for traveling to places where you might be in hot weather and want to wear shorts but then need pants to enter a Church or Temple, for example.)
I brought along a 'Rick Steves' laundry line that we could use to hang up to dry clothes. It has a twisted rubber line so you don't need clothes pins you just pull apart the rubber line and push the clothes in and the lines pop back together to hold the clothes The laundry line we got has Velcro on either end to tie it up - you could wrap it around a tree, a bathroom facet, a balcony railing, etc.. It worked very well and was very handy for bathing suits. (Here's a link to a picture of the laundry line http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media/product-gallery/B00332F1WY/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_0?ie=UTF8&index=0)
Happy laundry,
Jackie
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