Our adventure is beginning gradually,  which is a very good thing.  Even though we packed up all our stuff and rented our house out, the time off,  road trip portion of the adventure hasn’t begun yet.  Instead we’re getting our home base established at my parents’ house in Eastern Washington:  storing stuff,  changing addresses,  updating insurance and all those other mundane things necessary to make sure life functions smoothly while we’re on the road and away from civilization.

We’re also spending some time renting a vacation house in Sandpoint,  Idaho.  Sandpoint is a town I’ve always considered as a possibility for one day living if we get tired of bigger cities.   It’s situated on a large,  gorgeous lake for all sorts of fun summertime activities,  and right at the bottom of a ski resort for winter fun.   It’s also a relatively progressive oasis in the middle of relative isolation,  but still close enough to Spokane that a “big”  city is accessible for anything you need big cities for (mostly flying to other big cities).

We got an awesome surprise to start the month off: the Hartons visiting from Portland!  Their scheduled vacation had a change of plans,  so they found themselves wandering our direction, and ended up spending the 4th of July with us. It was nice to have one of the best parts of Portland come to us to help ease our transition.

We’re also fortunate that a friend of mine from high school Chris Blair and his family live in Sandpoint,  so we had someone we knew to hangout with.   Plus Geneveve adores his 9 year old son, and he has a boat that we got to go out on. We’re close enough to my parents that it’s easy for them to come over for the day and watch the girls, and close enough to many of my other relatives that we could visit them for overnights.

We lucked out finding a place to rent,  something we’ve been looking at doing for a few years now.   But in the past everything was either booked so far ahead (better book in January or earlier for a summer stay),  or incredibly expensive.   Sandpoint is a small town,  but it seems to be a major summer vacation destination. We ended up with a great 3 bed,  2 bath house within walking distance to everything.   Maybe not walking distance for the kids to our most visited attraction, the city beach,  but still close enough that it’s something we could easily do regularly.

One small issue for me has been wifi speed, namely it’s slow.   At least compared to what I’m used to.   My parent’s Internet is barely fast enough for me to do a Google hangout, very laggy for screen sharing and impossible to do much more than one of those at a time.   Wifi in Sandpoint was generally not a lot better,  even in the local Starbucks.   I’ve made do, but tasks like backing up my photos and videos take days to complete.  I’ve been averaging speeds of 5mbps down and not even 1mbps up.  There is fiber available in these parts,  but it’s rare to find anyone who has it.

As we near the end of our time in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho, we’ll make our way to Montana to visit some friends,  and there’s where my 2 months of time off will begin along with the epic road trip.

The idea behind this month of stopover between our regularly scheduled life in Portland and our road trip is to hopefully make the transition easier.  We’re out of our normal routine,  but not yet on our own and living out of a car. We’re away from our normal group of friends, but around another existing group of friends and family. If nothing else it’s given us time to refine our planning and packing for the trip even more,  instead of relying on our completely overwhelmed brains that had just finished packing up a whole house to remember everything we’ll need for 2 months in a car.