On the Loose Again!

(The view from our balcony on Key Allegro Island)

Well, our bucket list item was to spend a season living on the coast. We never actually defined what a "season" was. If you're looking at calendar seasons, we actually spent 6...a year and a half. We really enjoyed our time in Rockport, but as we started looking for a home to buy, it became quite apparent that the housing market was beyond our means. So we thought we'd do what we started doing back in 2009: live in the Hill Country and take frequent vacations to Rockport. It'll be even better now than it was then, because we have many good friends whom we can look forward to seeing when we visit the coast. It's a lovely 3 1/2 to 4 hour drive...just long enough to let you know you're really on vacation, but short enough to leave after breakfast and arrive in time for lunch! 

(Sunrise over Aransas Bay. See that tiny speck on the far right? That's the Rainbow, a Rockport-based shrimp boat, and as I took this photo, Curt was on it, shrimping with his good friend and boat captain, Hoang.)

We'll probably spend extended time in Rockport during "cedar season" in the Hill Country...I'm highly allergic to the cedar pollen that makes so many people miserable and sick in December, January, and February. But what better time to hit the south Texas coast?? And with Lucy, our trusty travel trailer, we can set up in one of the many RV parks in Rockport. Now we feel like we'll have the best of both worlds!

Right now we're between those worlds...driving back to Rockport after our last preliminary trip to the "new" house in Kerrville, staging for the big move. Our faithful friends from Riverhill Movers in Kerrville, Carlos, Beto, and Richard, will be at our Rockport house bright and early Thursday morning (eeeeek! That's only 4 days away!) to load everything into their moving truck, our pick-up, trailer, and minivan, and haul it all back to Kerrville. Just a year ago they hauled it all in the other direction!

We've packed up a lot of our belongings, but there's plenty left to keep us more than busy for the next few days. And as everyone who has ever moved knows, it's all the little stuff left over at the very end that's the deadliest! You think you have room for everything, and then you notice how many little piles of miscellany you haven't packed yet. It's amazing how much room that stuff takes!

We've carefully planned this move, taking a month to do the switch in stages. Curt still needs to be careful about the weight he lifts after his major surgery less than 3 months ago, so we've been moving some of the lighter, bulkier items by ourselves over the past few weeks. That'll leave more room in the moving van for the heavy items for our young, strong friends to muscle around. We've spent enough time in the new house now that we have a pretty good idea of where to place all our furniture. And we've been able to have some work done on the house by our new friend Mauricio, while the house is relatively empty. He's done some painting, some tile work, and has fixed up lots of little things around the house that needed attention.

So we have a little over 2 weeks to get settled before we have to head back to Rockport for Curt's follow-up abdominal surgery on May 18. We want to travel back to have the same wonderful surgeon, who we hope will remember where he left all the disconnected parts inside Curt and will be able to find them and reconnect them all. Curt will be in the hospital 5-6 days again, and afterward we'll stay in Rockport another week or two at the guesthouse of our dear friends John and Ginger Gay, while Curt starts his recuperation and gets clearance from his surgeon to travel back to Kerrville.By the time we get back to our new house, all the hard work of moving will be behind us, and we can just enjoy our new home and neighborhood. That's the plan, anyway, and so far it has worked out very well!

Here's our new home in Kerrville. We'll show you lots more pictures of the inside and outside as we get settled: