Exploring Denver

I don't have any pretty pictures for this post because we haven't taken any yet. We got into Denver on Sunday afternoon and chilled. Yesterday morning Rich took the car & went to work at Maverick, leaving me to do....nothing. Yes, I could have done dishes, cleaned up, ridden the path behind our RV park, but I was feeling lazy & painfully aware that these are my last few lazy days before I go to work in 3 weeks. I did manage to do 2 loads of laundry & secure us a parking spot in Tucson, less than 5 miles from where I'll be working. It's technically in Catalina, about 5-10 miles north of Tucson. It's close to our favorite part of Tucson where the good shopping, mountain biking & Mt. Lemon is. The montly cost, $350 is much less than the $525 everyone else around there was quoting me. It's more than the campground where we have reservations ($315), but that was also 25 miles away in the middle of nowhere.

Yesterday we met our new real estate agent, Jodi Keiter-Wilson, who was referred to us by our old agent, Konnie Shaw. I had originally picked out some homes in the Golden area that I thought looked interesting. The appeal was that they were "out in the woods", so there was no landscaping or lawn to speak of. One house, was just beautiful & I'd convinced Rich to do a drive-by on Sunday evening. Holy Hill People!!!! Not only was this house 23 miles west of where we are now, but it was a good 10 miles up a windy canyon road. It was 57 degrees when we left, and 46 when we got to the house. The house did look nice, but there's no way we'd ever get up or down that road in the winter.

So Jodi and I developed a quick "Plan B" where she picked a few houses in areas she thought we might like, but the emphasis was going to be on areas, not on houses since we won't be in the market to buy until at least May '07. The good news is that Denver's market is only doing slightly better than Detroits, so it's still very much a buyers market. We actually liked the first house we saw. The best part of it was the protected land & moutain in the back yard. The bad part was that it was literally across the street from an elementary school! That may sound fine to some, but when you are childfree by choice, it's not such a good thing. So on we went, driving by some houses, going in others until we'd seen 8 total. At the end of the day we were tired and hungry, so Jodi dropped us off while we went to get a pizza for dinner.

-Laura