Back from Montana (a Little Late)

One of the problems with living in a two-blogger-household is that it is very easy to just never get around to posting about certain topics. Sometimes I may start sketching out a post in my head, but long before I can get to it, Laura has already discussed it. A natural tendency towards laziness rears up, and the post I had been composing wanders off and ends up in that stack of "meant to do this" in some back corner of my brain. This happens quite a bit, especially since Laura currently has much more time on her hands for blogging than I do.

So I realized this morning that, other than my post yesterday about Katrina, the last time I posted was from a hotel room in Missoula, Montana! I've been back from that way-too-short trip now for a week and a half and I never posted about how it ended up, or all of our pictures!

If you do read Laura's blog, you probably already know most of this. We decided to go ahead and buy a townhome in a new neighborhood called Hellgate Meadows. The foundation for our lot already exists:



The house should be ready sometime in December, which means we really must sell our current house soon. We did get some good news last weekend -- we had two showings the same day, and one of the groups had our house on their "short list" of three. I am still holding out some hope that they will buy it. In the meantime, we're probably going to drop our price a bit more so that we can stay competitive with all the other houses in the neighborhood. Supposedly the real estate market tends to pick up after Labor day, so I have high hopes.

Back to the Montana trip. I was there just a few days -- arriving very late Saturday night (Aug. 20) and leaving in the afternoon on the following Tuesday (Aug. 23). In that time Laura showed me around several of the neighborhoods and houses she had rejected. We also visited the Hellgate Meadows place several times. I "tested" how it would be to walk over to the Barnes & Noble -- as noted here, walkability is an important consideration for me. I still mourn the loss of mature trees, but in my long list of "wants" and "needs" for the new house, the Hellgate Meadows townhome met more of them than most of the other places. So, we took a deep breath, went back to the real estate agent's office, and wrote up the offer.

A few pictures from the trip. Some of these were previously posted on Laura's blog:

This is an existing house similar to ours, although ours will be a different color (we haven't chosen the color yet):


These two pictures are from the alley behind the above house, showing what lies to the immediate south of our new neighborhood:




I hope the people who own that land hang on to it and resist the temptation to sell. I love the idea of all that open space so nearby! And no, the smell of the horses does not worry me in the least. It isn't as though there is a huge herd of cattle living there.

This one was taken from where the front porch of our new house will be:

There are some lots immediately across the street that will have houses, so this view won't stay quite like this. Hopefully it should still be pretty good from the second floor room looking in this direction. I plan to use that room as my home office.

I admit I am nervous about this. I would have felt better selling our house first, before committing to buying a new house, but it just wasn't practical. There aren't many lots left in this particular neighborhood, and apparently they are very popular. The green house shown above was built in 2003. The owners put it on the market and it sold in less than a week!

At any rate, we did try to just do a few vacation-like things during the way-too-short trip. We went for a short walk in Greenough Park where I took this shot:


We stayed at the Holiday Inn Parkside, which is right next to Bess Reed park and has great views of Mount Sentinel:


Finally, I made Laura pull into a parking lot so that I could get a shot of this -- apparently, despite the name, this is NOT a gay bar: