Travel – Laundry and Dishes

5 Winter Road-Trip Must-Haves

blue sedan on snow at daytime — Photo by Oziel Gómez on Pexels.com

Hello Everyone!

I know this is a few days late and now that I’m back from my vacation, hopefully I will not have anymore late blogs.

Anyway I thought since we road-triped down to New Mexico and back to see friends and family for the holidays and to celebrate our first anniversary, I would share with you all some essentials that made the 18 hour car ride more enjoyable.

Snacks! If you are in the car for a long time you definitely need snacks to prevent hangry driving.
Drinks. I don’t know about you guys but when I’m eating a lot of salty, dry car food, I need something to help wash it all down.
Tunes! I think this is just a general car rule: When you are in the passenger seat it is your job to pick good driving music. You want it to be upbeat enough that the driver isn’t falling asleep, not too annoying so that the driver can concentrate on the road, and good enough that you and the driver can enjoy the ride by dancing around every once in a while.
An emergency kit. Especially if you are going on a long trip during the winter you will need jumper cables, tools, a blanket or two, a flashlight, extra food, and whatever else you think you might need in case you get a flat tire or break down in the middle of nowhere.
Windex/a good ice-remover. Especially in winter you really need to be able to wash your headlights and windows at any time because sometimes its a blizzard outside and there is so much snow and ice on your vehicle that you need to pull over and remove it all so that you can continue to have a safe trip.

Thanks for joining me!

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Labor Day Weekend

Hello everyone!

I realize this post is a little late, but for Labor Day weekend my husband and I went camping and we had a blast!

We saw a lot of beautiful scenery, sunrises and sunsets, the moon and stars, and a ton of wildlife. There was a young black bear eating berries right in the middle of the road, a few antelope, some mule deer, an elk, a very sneaky coyote, and a handful of white-tail deer.

But the biggest part of our adventure was cooking breakfast.

Of course we brought all the usual camp food with us. It was mostly ramen noodles, instant oatmeal, and individual coffee packets because our camp stove is only capable of boiling water 12 oz of water at a time.

Each morning there were a few different options for making breakfast.

We could boil enough water for both of us to have coffee. Or we could boil enough water for both of us to have oatmeal. Or we could boil enough water for one of us to have coffee and oatmeal while the other person waited their turn.

I don’t know about you, but I am the kind of person that wakes up and is immediately a hungry grouch and I like to start the coffee before I start cooking breakfast so they will both be done at about the same time. Then I like to eat my breakfast and sip my coffee while easing into the day.

My husband is the opposite. He rarely needs coffee to function and the second his feet touch the ground in the morning, he is ready to go. For breakfast he will usually have a granola bar or some other snack which will hold him over until lunch.

Unfortunately getting the camp stove to work is a little tricky. If there was even a hint of a breeze, whoever was cooking was unable to light the stove. If there was no breeze the stove would heat the pot up until the wind blew and then the flame would go out. So whatever we were making was usually almost warm but never hot because after trying to boil a cup of water for 30 minutes, my husband and I would just give up, eat, and go about our day.

Below is a picture to shed a little insight into our daily routine. And as always, we had quite the adventure.

A Break From My Blog

Hello everyone!

I’m not sure if anyone noticed, but this summer I took a pretty big break from my blog. Since it wasn’t intentional, I never posted about it so I’m sorry if anyone actually looked forward to reading my weekly blog. But I am back and I feel like I can finally write again so I thought I’d tell you all why I needed such a long break.

The biggest reason for me was my physical and mental health. If I’m brave enough, next week I will post about what has been going on there for the last few months. I’m not quite sure if I’m ready to share that with everyone yet but I will soon because I’ve never been one to keep secrets from anyone. I do feel however that I am still processing everything so if I’m not brave enough to post about it next week, I will post about it eventually.

For now I will just say that both my husband and I have had a summer full of big feelings. Since this blog is from my perspective and not his and I would never write about another person’s feelings, this post will not include how he has felt this summer. He did offer to write a post from his perspective if anyone would be interested in that. If you are, you can leave a comment and we will consider it.

My second reason why I haven’t been writing is because I have been so busy that I just haven’t had time to sit down and write. That is such a silly excuse but I have been traveling so much this summer that I haven’t had access to a computer or reliable WiFi. I never blog on my phone because I don’t like to write a ton on a keyboard that is designed to text.

Anyway, I think I will dedicate the next portion of this post to tell you about my summer adventures.

In May I went home to Alaska. My brother and his wife were going on vacation so my sister in-law and I were going to babysit all the kids. Long story short, they canceled their vacation because my brother’s baby ended up in the hospital. Everyone is happy and healthy now but for a second there it was pretty scary.

June was a month full of big feelings and I will get more into that next week?

In July my sister asked me if I could go home to Alaska to babysit her kids for a few weeks. One of my brothers ended up coming to visit us and we installed a dishwasher. Other than that it was pretty uneventful although I was still dealing with everything from June so I was pretty exhausted the whole time.

August has been another month full of big feelings and changes and I will also get more into that next week.

Anyway hopefully this updated you guys a little bit on how the summer has been.

* Photo from Free WordPress Library

House Hunting

Hello everyone!

Since moving into the middle of nowhere Montana, I have come to measure civilization by the number of Walmarts a town or city has. This may seem a little weird, but where we are currently living there are about ten small towns scattered throughout the abyss and the closest Walmart is a two and a half hour drive away. The most exciting part of this post is that we are moving to the closest town in the region with a Walmart!

This past Friday Mike and I left the house at about 7am and drove to meet with a couple of rental management agencies to tour a few apartments and houses. About the same time we left the house, the sun began to rise and I felt like we were driving into a new beginning.

Unfortunately house hunting ended up not being as exciting as I expected. Mike and I learned that there are only two sections in the whole town. One is called the “good” side of town and the other is called the “bad” side of town. Even with this distinction, it seemed to me that the houses in both sides of town had an equal amount of neglect.

Our first rental management agent took us to an apartment complex that had been the town’s first post office before being converted into a hotel. A while later someone decided to convert it into an apartment complex which was located in the “bad” side of town. The building was a little on the rickety side, but there was a one bedroom apartment available that was in better shape than the houses we toured in the “good” side of town.

We met with a second rental management agent who had a number of houses and trailers available, but decided not to show us because they were in pretty tough shape and she didn’t want us living in any of them. All the homes she managed were in the “good” side of town.

She did have a two bedroom house with an older woman living in the basement that we were a little interested in. If we decided to live there, we would be prohibited from walking too loudly because it would bother the lady downstairs. Another issue was that the previous renter had just moved out and had left the place in shambles so there was a lot of repairs that needed to be done before someone could move in.

After meeting with both people, Mike and I decided to talk things over. We went to Walmart for some packing supplies and then decided to drive home. Even though it was March there was a winter storm warning for later that day, but we hoped we would be able to beat it.

Boy were we wrong. It started snowing casually and then the wind started to howl. Before we knew it we were driving home in a blizzard. To make things even more exciting there was a semi-truck jack-knifed in the middle of the road. After about an hour, we finally made it about 10 miles down the road.

When we finally made it to the next town over, we had to stop at a gas station to scrap a few inches of snow and ice off our headlights, taillights, and windshield. We drove in the same conditions for another couple of hours and after that, the sun came out. Eventually it stoped snowing and we were able to drive back to the house without anything else exciting happening.

Now we are just waiting to see if there will have a house for us to move into next week.

* Photo from Free WordPress Library

Dirty Laundry

Hello Everyone!

I know that laundry is not a super exciting subject so I will try to dress up the discussion of it as much as I can.

When living at home with your parents, you often have a washing machine and dryer in your home.

If you live on campus in college, you probably have a small laundry on your floor or at least in your building.

If you live in an apartment complex, you most likely have access to a laundry that is walking distance from your house.

If you still need to do laundry and for some unknown reason decide you want to leave the house to do it, there will most likely be at least one laundry-mat in your town.

I unfortunately do not have access to any of these luxuries when it comes to doing laundry.

If you don’t know already, I just moved to an itty-bitty town in Montana and am living in a basement-house with my husband; and we are not privileged enough to own a washing machine or dryer yet. This would not be a huge inconvenience if there was a hint of laundry-mat in town. Unfortunately, the nearest one is about an hour’s drive down the road to the next town over.

Because of this, the “simple” task of doing laundry becomes a character building adventure.

Let me paint you a small picture of my laundry day.

First, I wake up at 5 am because Mike goes to work at 6. Then I go on facebook and drink coffee and try very hard to wake up. At about 7 am I am capable of rational thought so I make a list. This is the first of many lists and is actually a very important step in my day. If I didn’t have lists I would probably leave the house without my brain.

Usually my first list tells me what I need to get done in the next town over. It includes things like:

Go to bank
Laundry
Groceries
Eat

After I make my first list, I make a second list of groceries I will need throughout the next week. When I am done, I make one more list. This is arguably the most important one because it tells me exactly what to bring on my outing.

I will give you an example.

Dirty laundry
Laundry Detergent
Fabric Softener
Dryer Sheets
QUARTERS!!
Reusable Grocery Bags
Insulated Grocery Bag (for dairy products and other cold or frozen things that can spoil on the one hour drive home)

I honestly don’t know how I ever leave the house because by the time I wake up, make my lists, and pack everything I need to bring with me, an additional hour or so has gone by.

After I finally get around to leaving the house, I drive like a maniac on a country road for about an hour to the laundry-mat because doing laundry is stressful and not a relaxing chore like it used to be when I was 13 and trying to suck up to my parents.

* Photo from Free WordPress Library

The Honeymoon

Hello Everyone!

The honeymoon that Mike and I went on was not a traditional “go to Hawaii for two weeks” honeymoon.

I don’t know if there is anyone else like me, but when I go on vacation I sort of like to lay around recuperating from the stresses of everyday life. As you can imagine Mike is the exact opposite. While he loves an adventure packed full of excitement, I love to sleep in a little and casually enjoy the rest of the day. Our honeymoon turned out to be a mixture of both.

First of all, it was more of a road-trip from our wedding venue in New Mexico to the house that Mike had rented for us in Montana.

For some reason we thought that driving across the country in five days would be a relaxing and reasonable goal.

I’m sure you can imagine what our car looked like. It was packed to the brim with wedding gifts, luggage and everything I owned because we decided not to move in together until after the wedding.

Each day was like a completely separate mini-vacation. We would get up at 5am to drink coffee and get ready for a day of tourism and maniac driving because we seemed to be almost lost nearly all the time with GPS yelling directions at us at every stop sign and light.

To Mike, this was the perfect vacation. To me it was a fun but exhausting experience. Because we were constantly on the move, I had to take an additional small stay-cation when we arrived in Montana so I could recover from the wedding and the honeymoon. Getting to sleep in until 8am for one day was the most relaxing part of the honeymoon.

All in all we did end up seeing some really neat things. We spent the night at the Inn of the Mountain Gods in New Mexico before driving to Colorado where we went to a hot-spring. Mike and I also decided to stop at the last minute in Wyoming to see some of Yellowstone National Park.

* Photo from Free WordPress Library

Character Building Experiences

Hello everyone!

This is my very first blog. If anyone has any comments, please feel free to say hi!

I would like to give an example definition of the term “character building experience”. In only a few short months as a newlywed, I have had many different character building experiences. This is the story of one of my very first experiences.

In the picture above is the very first house that my husband and I lived in together as a married couple. Just so you have a little background information, I was raised in a home with very traditional values. Because of this, my husband and I didn’t live together before we got married. Instead he moved to Montana after college for a job opportunity and got a house. I finished my degree, then we got married and I moved in.

Since I had not seen the house before I arrived, I thought we would be living in an apartment. Perhaps this thought was brought on by a sense of false newlywed optimism. Anyway, you can imagine my surprise when Mike drove up after the honeymoon, parked the car and cheerfully said “Honey! We’re home!”

Once I got over the shock of the outside appearance, I found that I was able to enjoy living in it. It’s in a pretty great neighborhood where everyone is friendly and welcoming. Plus there are two bedrooms, and a pretty decent sized living room.

One night after we had settled in a little, Mike and I were watching the news. There was a pretty big winter storm warning and I jokingly told my dear husband that since we lived underground we probably had the safest house in the whole town. The next day as I helped Mike shovel his way out of the house to the car I thought to myself if this had been a tornado, we would have been totally safe.