joy & nostalgia: Our Move to the Beach and the Dunes

Lake Michigan shoreline, September 2012

So, real quick, we had an exhausting move a couple weeks ago. Just the 2 of us moving everything we owned. INSANE! Before the next move, furniture is getting sold and we are taking so much less! We are pretty lucky, however, that what we do have works perfectly in our "cottage in the woods"!

That is our place, to the left, nestled among the trees

We spent 6 hours the day before cleaning the rental...and we could have spent more time, as, unfortunately, the tenants who vacated only the day before, were clearly not into cleanliness!

The move took us 10 hours! Chris only wanted to do 2 trips (even tho we only had 11 miles each way from our house in Hobart to the rental in Ogden Dunes) with the UHaul. And we were so fortunate that the rain predicted for that afternoon held out until overnite! (It did impact my sleep...new place, new sounds, sleeping on the sofabed, hearing acorns pounding the roof, worrying about Luna as she discovers all the new places she shouldn't be!)

We spent the next week diligently working to get the place looking like us! We had no tv b/c Chris wasn't able to connect our DirecTV box to the satellite dish. I definitely KNOW that not having the tv to distract us, we got more done than we could have expected. Within a few days, things really started to come together. By week's end, it looked like we had been there for awhile! We had our wall decor up ~ and it was fun to figure out where to put it in the new place!!

We made sure to get out a few times, tho. Two mornings, we headed out for walks and one evening we went to Panera to eat and get online.

We are still feeling out-of-sorts, but we describe it as being on vacation! We live in the woods with a very short walk to the beach, along the Lake Michigan shoreline. We have taken many walks around our community, to & along the beach and Chris has been running almost daily.

We intend to walk every weekend, weather-permitting. We hiked a 3-mile trail, part of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, on Sunday. The leaves are changing here and autumn in all of her glory is so gorgeous to enjoy on foot among the trees.

We get to see deer almost daily, on our way to work, on our walks, on Chris's runs...they are pretty calm and just watch as we slowly pass by.

Isis and Luna are settling in, too. We have a 3-seasons room where they can sit for hours and watch the birds, squirrels and chipmunks. (We would like to get some deer back there, too, but need to buy a salt-lick or something similar to attract them.) There is a ladder to the loft area and we knew that Luna would try to figure out how to get up there...what I didn't expect was that she would master it the first day!