South Dakota

Outside Wall Drug in Wall, South Dakota

I’ve been pretty busy with work so not much time to post, but I’m still  trying to finish up the posts about the remainder of our cross-country trip. When we last left our intrepid family, they were experiencing varied adventures in and around Yellowstone National Park. From The Buffalo In The Road, to Where The Heck Is Our Cabin, to The Cow Skull Of Doom, it was quite the couple of days.

The creek right outside our Yellowstone cabin

We were sad to leave Yellowstone with so much left to see, but were happy to get on the road again. We had already been on the road for 11 days and were only in Wyoming! Time to get moving.

So on the morning of August 13^th we bade farewell to my Aunt and Uncle and headed out for points east. We made it to Rapid City, South Dakota after a long day on the road. Our route took us through Bighorn National Forest, which had some beautiful scenery.

At Bighorn National Forest. 

A while after getting on highway 90, we detoured off to see the Devil’s Tower, which is of course mandatory for any self-respecting fan of Close Encounters of The Third Kind. We didn’t make it all the way there, but got close enough for a scenic view:

 At the scenic overlook

With Charlie photobomb

We stayed in Rapid City SD that night. The next morning, the 14^th, we visited Mt. Rushmore. 

Heading to the colonnade

The carvings are incredibly impressive, and the visitor’s center was very nicely done. I particularly enjoyed learning how they carved the monument. The sculptor, Gutzon Borglum, made scale models which the workers used to figure out the location of the finished surface in order to calculate where to dynamite. This method was so successful that 90% of the carving was done by dynamite. We also took a walk for a closer view, although it was pretty hot out.

A closer look

The Nostril Viewpoint. No, that's not an official name or anything. :)

Apparently Thomas Jefferson was big on ice cream, so of course we had to have some while we were there:

Tasty!

Ice Cream = Thomas Jefferson

After Mount Rushmore, we headed to Wall Drug for some lunch and homemade donuts. I had no idea what to expect from Wall Drug – all I knew was that everybody said not to miss it so I expected something epic.

I was not disappointed.

Wall Drug is basically an Old West tourist trap on steroids, but with enough character and originality to make the kitchy-ness seem appealing and not overwhelming. We ate lunch in the Western Art Gallery room, where every wall was covered with Western paintings. We of course took advantage of the Free Ice Water and 5 Cent Coffee (well, I was the only one who had coffee).

FREE ICE WATER!!!11!!!1

After lunch we did some souvenir shopping, tried the shooting gallery, and admired the giant Jackalope statue. Outside there was also a water play area with water fountains shooting up out of the ground. Alice thought this was the best thing ever and played there for about 30 minutes. No surprise to anyone who follows me on facebook - my kids (especially Alice) are notorious for getting soaking wet whenever they possibly can.

She got soaked and was deliriously happy.

On the Jackalope

Sadly, we didn’t get to explore all of Wall Drug but we had a lot of ground yet to cover that day, so we bade farewell to the Jackalope, bought some housemade doughnuts to eat in the car, and headed out. That pretty much ended our Western adventures – we sped through the rest of South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois en route to my Dad’s house in Michigan. Partly because we were getting a bit tired of being on the road, and partly because there was not a whole lot to do along our route in those states. 

Welcome to Cheshire

We’re here! Actually we’ve been here for a week, but it has been VERY busy.

I still have some photos from our cross-country trip to post, but I figured I would start with some observations about our home for the next four-ish months.

Chesire, Connecticut is a town of about 30,000 in southern Connecticut. It seems to be highly regarded among towns in the area, and has a reputation for good schools. In fact, it was recently named by Time Magazine as one of the top 50 places to live in the US. Some old friends of ours moved to Cheshire while we lived in Boston, and we visited them many times since (although much less frequently since moving to California).

It was tough trying to find a decent rental in Cheshire for less than a year, but after much hard work by Dan, we finally found one. We wanted to stay in Cheshire because a) our friends are here, b) it has good schools, c) it is close to Dan’s university, and d) elementary school goes through the 6^th grade. A couple of neighboring towns had good schools, but middle school started in 6^th grade. We felt it would be a cruel and unusual punishment for Charlie to start a new school AND middle school at the same time, not to mention the extra aggravation of having the kids at two different schools. So Cheshire it was.

What Dan managed to find was a 3-bedroom apartment on the second floor of a historic house in the middle of downtown Cheshire. We love historic houses, so welcomed the opportunity to live in one again. The bonus was that it was newly renovated inside. The house is called the George Keeler house, and was originally built in about 1875. Apparently it is a well-known house in the town. The story we heard is that the George Keeler house and another old house next to it were in disrepair and belonged to the same owners. The owners and the town came to an agreement where the other house would be torn down since it was unsalvageable, and the George Keeler house would be restored. The owners did a very nice job restoring our house – they must have gutted the entire inside of the house, and the outside is freshly painted with new landscaping. Here’s a photo of the kids and me in front of the house:

Having lived in a historic house before, we are fairly tolerant of old house quirks. For example, the floors are nowhere near level. We haven’t measured it yet, but we’re talking like a ½-inch per foot in some places! Oh well…

The other downside we’ve found is that the owners have started construction on a new building that is attached to the existing building (you can see it to the left in the photo). The hammering and other construction noises have been quite annoying, but the framing seems to be going quickly, and we’re hoping the noise will die down once they’ve finished with the shell of the new building.

Our friends did an amazing job of finding us a huge amount of furnishings for our apartment before we arrived, so when we showed up they had already moved in a queen bed, dining room table and chairs, desk and chair, lots of kitchen stuff including a COFFEE MAKER (very important) and COFFEE (ditto), and a ton of other stuff. They are the best!

Including a futon cushion without the frame:

The kids seem to be liking it just fine!

We have mostly finished furnishing the apartment after visiting several garage sales and an estate sale, three trips to IKEA, one trip to Target, two visits to Goodwill, two trips to Costco, and a visit to a mattress store. It is hard to resist the urge to buy more than the minimum needed for a functional living space, but I keep reminding myself that whatever we buy here we either have to get rid of or ship it cross-country. I have been restraining myself admirably, although for some reason Dan still won’t let me go to IKEA by myself. I wonder why…

Much of the first half of the week was spent getting the kids registered at the neighborhood school. It will probably be a post of its own someday, but suffice it to say that ever since I called the school about 3 months ago to find out about getting the kids registered, Murphy’s law has been highly in play. I tried to get as much done ahead of time as I could, but since we arrived we have made two trips to Urgent Care for school-related issues, made some frantic calls and emails to the kids’ former school, made two trips to the new school, and made many other phone calls and web searches trying to get everything done so they could start school this past Thursday. I lost quite a bit of sleep over it, but I am happy to say that they were able to start school on Thursday along with all the other kids, and even got to meet their teachers the day before. In keeping with the whole Murphy’s Law thing, Alice’s first name and middle name were switched when she was put into the school system, but we were able to clear it up with her teacher so at least the first day she didn’t have everything with the wrong name on it.

Charlie and Alice in front of their new school, Highland Elementary.

Checking out the playground equipment.

First day of school!

I am glad that their school had only two days of school this week – after all the issues getting them enrolled, and then the stress of the first couple days of school (their bus was 40 minutes late the first day! Murphy again...), I think we all are looking forward to the weekend.

Dan and I are slowly regaining our New England driving sensibilities. We are once again getting used to the lanes that suddenly appear and then just as suddenly disappear, roads that change name every few miles, no street grids, major potholes, etc. On the upside, gas is extraordinarily cheap by our standards - we paid $2.42/gal today.

The kids were, for the most part, real troupers while we dragged them around to all the shopping, although I admit at IKEA we did bribe them with the promise of ice cream. Sadly that did not prevent a classic Alice Meltdown^TM in the middle of the lighting area. So we still do not have a lamp for the dining room.

Alice has made a friend at school already (a girl in her class who is also new to the school) and Charlie has been able to play Minecraft and Terraria with his online friends and friends from back home, although the time difference makes things a bit tricky for being able to play at the same time as his friends in SLO. No word yet on whether he has found someone at school to talk about Minecraft with, although I'm sure it's only a matter of time.

We’ve visited the town library twice so far. It is about an 8-minute walk from our house, and is very nice. One of the things I have really missed about the area is their fantastic libraries. Cheshire is smaller than SLO but has a much better library. The teen area alone is about the size of the entire children’s room in SLO. I am definitely looking forward to taking advantage of the library while we’re here!

I’ve been going for runs on the nearby multi-use path that follows the route of an old canal. I’m told the path goes for miles and miles. The path is flat, straight, and shady, making it an ideal running route. I am still figuring out how to cope with the high humidity, which makes it feel like I am inhaling soup when I run. Develop gills maybe?

I think we’ve accomplished a lot in our first week. School, work, and the apartment have mostly fallen into place. More importantly, I think we have settled in enough that instead of feeling strange, most things feel almost normal. After three weeks on the road and a crazy busy first week here, almost normal feels pretty darn good.

An Anniversary

It is August 19^th, and the Jansens are on the move again. We left my Dad’s house in Chelsea, MI this morning after spending 2 days there visiting my family. We are currently in Hamilton, Ontario (Canada, eh?). It seems fitting that we should be traveling today, as this reminds me of another traveling day exactly 19 years ago.

 Just before heading out this morning

On August 19^th, 1996, Dan and I were finishing the process of leaving Evanston, Illinois and moving to Somerville, MA for Dan’s new tenure-track position at Tufts University. It was a Monday. The movers were supposed to have come to pick up our furniture and boxes the previous Friday, but did not show up, and phone calls to their office went unanswered. So unfortunately we spent the weekend living with boxes. 

Fortunately the movers showed up on Monday. It turned out that I stayed at the apartment to oversee the movers while Dan headed back to Northwestern University to officially turn in his PhD thesis. In the afternoon, we cleaned up the apartment (I loved that apartment in South Evanston. It had a brick wall, sun porch and a uniquely-textured living room ceiling which we named “The Funky Planet”) and tried to figure out what to do with the remaining items that did not fit into our 1986 Honda Accord. One item that did make it was the frozen top tier from our wedding cake of the year before. Our plan was to drive the 4 hours to my family’s house in Chelsea that night, a first-day distance which had originally seemed quite reasonable. 

But between one thing and another, we didn’t leave Evanston until that evening. We ended up getting into Chelsea at about 11:30 pm after an exhausting day. Just enough time before midnight to drag ourselves into the house and have some of the now nicely-defrosted wedding cake, for August 19th, 1996, was in fact our first wedding anniversary. If you’re counting, this also makes today our 20^th wedding anniversary.

I don’t remember most of our anniversaries. We tend to be pretty low-key with anniversaries and birthdays as a general rule. During the B.C. (Before Children) era, we would typically go out for a fancy dinner, although the only one I remember with any clarity is the Four Seasons in downtown Boston. But we will always remember our first wedding anniversary because of the uniqueness of that day.

So it is fitting that we will always remember our 20^th wedding anniversary because we are again traveling. In fact, right now we are traversing almost the same route that we took 19 years ago from Chicago to Boston. 

We have gone through a lot of changes in the past 20 years. Kids, pets, jobs, houses, cities, states. Currently we are in the midst of a quite challenging change, uprooting the family to spend the fall semester in Connecticut. 

Yet I am also reminded of the fact that throughout the past twenty years, Dan and I have successfully navigated all of the challenges and changes because we have done so together. And so, while I am uncertain about what lies ahead of us in Connecticut (I hope it is great things, but if you know me you know I am not very good with uncertainty!) I know it will be OK, because Dan and I will be facing it together. Happy 20^th Anniversary to us!

(Obligatory wedding photo)