Home from visiting our Next Home!

On Tuesday morning Larry drove to work, Ft. Leavenworth, and I went later and picked him up around 12pm. We had lunch and off to Ft. Riley, KS we went! Most Army Installations are in the middle of nowhere and Ft. Riley is no exception. Much of the ride is green fields as far as you can see. Larry has not been at Riley since 1989 so things have changed since then to say the least. We drove around taking a look at the Post. The Historical housing is where we would live if we live on post. Those areas are so pretty. It is a pretty post and very BIG! They are making a lot of changes and doing a lot of building. They are in the process of building a new Commissary (Grocery Store) which is very good thing!

Before I go any further I have to tell you that I let out a little squill when I saw a Cracker Barrel sign a few miles from one of the gates. I know some of you are wondering why we love CB so much. I don’t know, the food is good, reasonably priced, you get choices of veggies and I like to shop there!

We checked into our room at the Lodge on post, unloaded our stuff and left to meet Mike and Shelly for dinner. After dinner, they introduced me to an ice-cream place called Stone Cold. Yum Yum! It was SO good! Later Larry and I made it back to our room. Once having a second look..OH MY…it was not the cleanest place I’ve ever been in. We have stayed on different post and bases before but our rooms were never quiet like this. Mike and Shelly stayed there before and their room was fine. I won’t go into details but let’s just say we got a refund for the second night and went elsewhere.

Wednesday morning we met with a lady to look at the historic housing on post. The homes are absolutely beautiful. The beauty and character of the homes was amazing. There were of course some downfalls to the homes as well. We loved the homes; however, they won’t work for us. We were SO hoping that it would work perfectly and be done with it but that was not the case. After looking on post Larry went to meet a few of the guys that will be working for and/or with him. I went to the library to search for homes online for us to see. After his meeting and my web surfing we had lunch and hit the road.

We visited a tiny town just outside one of the gates called Ogden. We had high hopes of living there but we were disappointed and must report that Ogden is a “no” unless a new area pops that we missed. (Which I doubt) We went to Manhattan looking for homes which is really the area we would like to live in. One problem is we want to live on the west side of Manhattan which is closer to the post. The homes we found on the west side that we liked and felt like were good neighborhoods were a wee bit expensive. Is that not always how it works?!?! There is one that we have our eye on but just did not want to pay the price they are asking. We had dinner at CB and we were off again to visit homes in Junction City which is right off one of the gates. Actually, JC was one of the areas we were trying to decide if we even wanted to look at homes there. Well, we did to get an idea of the area. We found 3 homes in JC that we are interested in. It’s one of those towns that you have to pick and choose the areas you feel comfortable in but aren’t most towns like that? We also keep telling ourselves, “It’s temporary” but at the same time we want to feel safe and enjoy our lives.

Thursday we headed back to Leavenworth. I dropped Larry off at work and I headed to Independence and Lee’s Summit to do some birthday shopping for the girls. Eventually Larry and I met back up at home. We went to eat Mexican and made a trip to Wal-Mart. After the wild and crazy trip to WM we went home. I started to embroider two sets of towels that we got for Catherine to take to college. I finished them and now here I am, bloggin’.
Oh, the most important event today….Molly came home from her Nana Beckies and was reunited with her Mommy!!!!! Larry picked her up from Beckies and on the drive here he put me on speaker phone and I was talking to her. He said her ears were perked up, her tail was waggin’ and she was looking around for her mommy! I sure do miss that fur ball when we are apart but Beckie spoils her just like we do and I know she is wonderful and loving hands.

To sum things up…We have no idea exactly where we will live. We still have some time and until our house sells we can’t do anything anyway. We do think we will enjoy living in the Ft. Riley area and look forward to the move.

We are having another open house this weekend and maybe we will have lots of traffic and even a buyer.

Keep praying for all of us that are trying to sell; Momma and Jeff, Tim, Loretta, Mike and Shelly and Us.