Northeast Corner of the Country

Friday, August 01, 2008

Hola, from Massachusetts! We arrived late Monday night. We’ve just been on a big slumber party of a vacation -- we packed all our belongings and watched them drive away in a big semi truck a week ago Thursday. We stayed in a local CA motel for a few nights, cleaned up the empty rented house, and “passed” our walk-through to get back our security deposit.

Currently we are in Frank’s apartment in Waltham. It’s one bedroom, and it has a den, so there is space to set up air mattresses for the kids. Thankfully, it has a pool, so we have gone swimming every day.

Massachusetts is very different from southern California. Here are a few things I have noticed right away.

1 – I feel like I have moved to the mountains! Green, green, green, and more trees than I have seen in a long time. And these are HUGE trees, not little scrawny ones. Just beautiful.

2 –Roads. California has 8-lane freeways and the “Rush Hour” actually lasts for 3 hours. Here, they have curvy, narrow, two-lane roads that wind around through the woods, at 25 and 30 miles an hour. And I hear that “Rush Hour” is just that: one hour.

3 – Moisture in the air. In California, our wetsuits will dry outside overnight. Here, towels hang out 2 days and they STILL are not dry!

4 – Hair. My hair does not quite know how to act in this humidity. ( OK, it was not exactly magazine-worthy in CA, either…but here, it does some funny things.)

5 – Insects. I didn’t really notice a lot of bugs in CA. There are plenty of critters to watch and/or avoid, here. Ants everywhere. Wasps, mosquitoes, dragonflies, katydids, butterflies, ladybugs. (You name it, and Teresa will try to catch it!)

6 -- Gas prices. The lowest I have seen so far is $3.84 per gallon. Wow! Awesome--by simply taking a flight east, we dropped 60 cents a gallon!

More to come, love, Kari