Fall Fun at home in BC

Back home to reality and the selling off of stuff continues...I do hope to have my living room back for Christmas.

The rain has arrived and the evenings are cooling off so painting has slowed to a minimum...everything is basically painted except for the gutters and eaves troughs. We are looking into a couple quotes to replace them...if not they might not get painted until the spring as we have almost finished the front but the other 3 sides are still blue! The door will have to be painted too but should we do it a yellow or a red???

We have managed to get out and enjoy our beautiful province a bit...

We went to Richmond Nature Park and was thrilled to find these amazing Muscaria Mushrooms. I have searched for them every fall for years and have never been lucky enough to find them. This week I scored and knocked them off my wishlist of things I want to photograph someday!

We also went to the pumpkin patch and collected some pumpkins.

Yesterday we enjoyed a wonderful roast dinner here with family as Ian's mom arrived from Toronto this week for a visit and today of course we celebrated Halloween!

Hoping you all had a safe and Happy Halloween!!!

Happy Birthday Aayla and Happy Thanksgiving to all

Happy Birthday sweet Aayla!!!

We celebrated yesterday with a tea party with family and friends.

House painting is coming a long slowly but surely (the blue trim will disappear and become a dark brown, as will the gutters)

but now we are going to be taking a bit of a break. Today we will have a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner with family and then Ian and I are heading to Jamaica for a week of rest and relaxation all by ourselves!

So Happy Thanksgiving everyone and we'll be back in a week or so :)

House Prep...AKA getting it ready to sell

Welcome wishes going out to The Solla-Mates of Happily Hitched: An RV Blog. Thanks for joining us as we begin this next journey :)

In order to sell our home in the new year we not only are selling off all our "stuff" left over from daycare and from the store we closed last fall, but we are finally painting our house which we have wanted to paint since we bought it in 2007. We have always hated the colours. (It's funny how when you decide to sell your home you find the motivation to deal with the issues you haven't liked about it for others to enjoy instead of you yourselves!)

While away this summer both of our neighbours painted their houses so we called to get quotes to paint ours. One company wanted close to $5000.00 and the other wanted $7800.00!!!

We decided to try our hand at painting it ourselves so now with our own time and energy and $1200.00 worth of paint and painting supplies we have begun!

In between our West Coast rain showers we have been pressure washing 4 years or more of dust and dirt off of that horrible grey and blue paint which makes the colours stand out even more!

And masking off windows and eaves and beginning the painting process.

We are gradually working our way around the house in one LoooOOOoooog slow process but little bit by little bit the house is being transformed. We have most of the main colour done, just trim and eaves troughs to do.

So we have put sunshine on order but the 5 day forcast looks like this :

Short Term ForecastUpdated: Fri, Sep 30, 2011, 21:00 PDT

	Friday OvernightOvernight: 12:00 AM - 5:59 AM	Saturday MorningMorning: 6:00 AM - 11:59 AM	Saturday AfternoonAfternoon: 12:00 PM - 5:59 PM	Saturday EveningEvening: 6:00 PM - 11:59 PM	Saturday OvernightOvernight: 12:00 AM - 5:59 AM
	Mainly cloudy	Cloudy	Cloudy with showers	Light rain	Cloudy with showers
Temp.	11°C	11°C	15°C	12°C	11°C
Wind	calm	SE 5km/h	SE 5km/h	SE 5km/h	SE 10km/h
Relative Humidity	88%	87%	88%	94%	94%
P.O.P.	30%	30%	40%	70%	40%
Rain	-	-	less than 1mm	1-3mm	close to 1mm

So it doesn't look like much painting is going to get done any time too soon :(

what have we been up to?

It is hard to believe that we have been home for almost 3 weeks now and this is the first I have sat down to update the blog!

Arriving at home after traveling for over 4 months and over 29,000km's was bitter sweet. The last days before arriving I was not excited at all. Our maiden voyage was coming to an end :(  Boo hoo I just wanted to cry!

However our trip this summer has solidified a couple things for us.

1. Our dream to build an Earthship... is destined to be more then a dream. You can read my post HERE about our time we spent in Taos at the Earthship community. We have been dreaming of building an Earthship for a couple of years but after spending time in an actual Earthship during our trip we now know for positively sure that we WILL build one. We just have to finalize if it will be built in BC or Ontario.

2. Our desire to travel...is not over. We spent just over 4 months on the road and LOVED it so much we decided before even returning home that we couldn't go back to life as we know it. We want to travel more and see more of what this world has to offer. So few of us are able to live our dreams when we are young; I feel so very fortunate that our business and hardwork creating them enables us to live our dreams now.

Building an Earthship also helps our travel goals as once built we will be able to travel in the winters and afford to leave a "home" behind while living on the road for 6 months of the year. Our Earthship home will take care of it'self and we won't have all those hydro and gas bills anymore to worry about and get the best of both worlds :)


Yes it is good to return home to something solid but home is really where you "make" it and our trailer while travelling was our home while on the road and we can't wait to live in it more permanently. We learned to adapt to living in a 35 foot trailer and didn't miss our 3600 sq ft house at all. After returning home and getting back into the swing of "normal" living there was a brief moment of "oh do I really want to sell our home?" but that lasted all of 1 day.

So now the selling begins...and in my living room which once looked like this

Our living room a couple years ago when we were considering selling
and then decided not to so the picture shows mls in corner :)

Now is full of all my supplies and equipment left over from one of our centres we closed a couple years ago and all my theme boxes I have been collecting and adding to for the last 22 years in the childcare field and looks more like this

And this doesn't even show everything...our foyer is full too!

SooOOooo as you can see I have been busy this past few weeks since we've returned home and have neglected this blog. I do plan on writing posts here to keep semi up to date on how the sale of all our stuff is going, how fixing up the house to sell is going, our decision where we want to buy land for the Earthship, then of course it will continue on with life in our RV for the next 3 or so years as we gradually build our Earthship, and then as we travel in our RV every winter after our Earthship is built...so as you can see we have a few loose ends to take care of before our next journey but we hope you stick around for the ride!

Yellowstone National Park

I feel like I am lying by saying we went to Yellowstone National Park today as we spent about 4 hours there instead of the recommended 4 days!

We didn't see most of the park but since we were just passing through on our way home we were happy to see what we saw and it left us wanting more. We will definitively be coming back to Yellowstone on one of our winter travels for sure!

Shortly after we entered the park we saw a Bison.

We called them buffalo all day but as I am writing this I decided to google the difference between Bison and Buffalo as I thought they were the same thing. What I call a Buffalo is actually a Bison. If you'd like to learn the difference take a look at  THIS SITE.

Here are some of the sites we saw today in the park

But our main focus as we passed through was of course Old Faithful and faithful she was! As we pulled in to park we could see her erupting above the trees :(

 We decided to go see the exhibits at the Visitors Centre and go have some lunch as we had 1 1/2 hours before the next expected eruption.

Aayla of course found the hats first thing :)

The rangers predict her eruption with in +/- 10 minutes and they were bang on today.

The crowds watching Old faithful Erupt

As we continued on out of the park we saw a lone elk resting by the river

and lots more beautiful scenery.

Sierra drew her first Owls today...
Awwww I LOVE Owls :)
and these ones are adorable!

A steam spout along the highway

 Then we came upon this herd of Elk.

There were many fishermen through the park

We tried to stop at Mammoth Springs as well but it was very busy and we couldn't find a place to park our 56' so we continued on knowing we would be back again soon to spend a few days in this great National Park and would get to see everything we had to drive by today.

Tonight we got in a bit later then expected to yet another Walmart in Butte Montana. There were a few RV's parked here and even a tent! I must say that's a first for us, seeing a tent at Walmart!

I always go in and ask Customer Service if it is OK to stay the night. Tonight the lady said to me "Of course dear" as if she couldn't imagine why any Walmart would say no. Thankfully most say yes as they sure are helpful when passing through from one place to the next, especially when we are speeding home!

Saying home sounds so weird as when we get "home" we won't be staying for long. After this 4 month trip we have discovered we can easily live in our small space. We would much prefer to have the freedom to travel and if giving up our "home" is necessary to do it; then so be it as "Home" is where you make it anyway ;)

We want to hit the road again. I'm afraid a typical home just wont cut it for us any longer...well at least for a few years if we can ever decide to buy land and build our earthship. I guess earthships aren't quite typical either. Even in our earthship we will be snowbirds for sure as the travel bug has bit us hard! We look forward to winter travelling soon but staying in places long enough to really get to know an area instead of whirl winding through like we have on this trip.

Today we only traveled 550KM's. Waiting for Old faithful to erupt today knocked off some good driving time but it was so worth it! Tomorrow we hope to get somewhere past Spokane and then it's a straight run for "home"...well after a quick stop at the Outlets :)