The Best of the May Walkabout

Now that we are back home, we thought we'd capture the 'bests' from our trip. Here they are, in no particular order...

The best place we didn't stop, and would like to return to see: Lake Coeur D'Alene, in Idaho. We drove by it on the way home, and thought it was one of the most beautiful places we had seen:

Best souvenirs: Deb's charm bracelet from Carmel, and Steve's Mount Rushmore mug, which matches his favorite Lake Powell mug.

Food...

Best home cooked meal: ham cooked in Coke at Sally's. Best brew pub: Bend Brewing Company in Oregon, where we had a beer sampler, calamari for an appetizer and salmon pizza. Best pizza at Campisi's, in Dallas:

We had pizza with Sally and Art at the original Campisi, known as the Egyptian Lounge when Jack Ruby ate there the night before shooting Lee Harvey Oswald:

In a typical Internet "walkabout", I ended up reading 50 pages of the deposition Joe Campisi gave about his association with Ruby - and all I was trying to do was get a picture of the restaurant back in 1963, when Ruby ate there. So easy to go off on a tangent, on the Internet....

Best hotel: The Driskill, in Austin.

Best chain hotel: Fairfield Inn. After saying in an earlier post that our plan to stay at Marriott hotels wasn't working for us, we stayed at Fairfields in Bend, Seattle, Bozeman, Rapid City and Rockford IL - basically, the whole end of the trip with the exception of Portland, where we stayed at the Mark Spencer. We found the Fairfields to be a good value, plus their consistency was a welcome comfort on the long trip home.

We received our best insight on the final day of the trip, from a nice man working breakfast at the Rockford hotel. It had opened only weeks before, and was lightly booked. They had upgraded us to a suite, and were taking good care of their relatively sparse clientele. When I was getting breakfast, I told one exceptionally helpful gentleman that I was well acquainted with their breakfast setup, since we had stayed at so many Fairfields in the last month. He asked about our trip and why we were traveling so long. I explained that we were investigating possible places to relocate to and he asked me what we had learned from our walkabout. I said 'that no place is perfect', and he replied 'yes -- not until you make it so'.

It was an insight worth driving 7500 miles for.

Dallas Highlights

Our friends in Dallas took great care of us, putting us up in their wonderful house, feeding us good food, and driving us around to see the many lovely Dallas neighborhoods. In between neighborhood 'shopping', we stopped by South Fork, the ranch where the TV show 'Dallas' took place. This Brahmin cow was standing in a nearby field:


The actual ranch was pretty unimpressive, but it had a nice gate:

The ranch house looked like it did on TV, only smaller. Could JR really have lived in such a modest place?

One of our favorite small towns, which also happens to be in Money Magazine's Top 10 Places to live, is McKinney. It is northeast of Dallas, and has its own quaint downtown square:

We saw many neighborhoods, in McKinney, in Heath/Rockwall where our friends live, and in Dallas proper that were both affordable and very pretty places to live. This, combined with our model evaluation, make Dallas a real possibility as our next home.

Dallas: Model Evaluation

Dallas is the first location to actually pass our model's criteria, though it is a close call on our cost of living requirement. According to the site I've been using for the cost of living numbers (http://swz.salary.com/CostOfLivingWizard/layouthtmls/coll_metrodetail_93.html), Dallas is 4% more expensive than Cleveland. But we live in Hudson, which is more expensive than Cleveland but is not available for the cost of living comparison. I also know from other parts of the model that housing is less expensive, as are taxes. Based on this, I said Dallas passed the requirement, but ultimately I may need to redesign the model. Given Ohio has a relatively low cost of living, it may be unrealistic to expect our new home to be even lower - perhaps being within 5% is good enough.

The whole Dallas model looks like this:

Dallas (Decision)

• ●This town is a good choice for our next home.
• ●AND [1 of 5] : This town has a good climate.
• ●AND [1 of 2] : This town has moderate winters.
• ○OR [1 of 2] : The number of days each year at or below freezing should be 10 or less.
• ●OR [2 of 2] : The average winter temperature should be at least 10 degrees warmer than Hudson OH.
• ●True
• ●AND [2 of 2] : This town has a good balance of sunshine and summer heat.
• ○OR [1 of 2] : This town has moderate summers in exchange for lots of sunshine.
• ●OR [2 of 2] : This town has lots of sunshine but hot summers.
• ●True
• ●AND [2 of 5] : This town has an affordable cost of living.
• ●AND [1 of 4] : This town has health insurance available for less than $1500 a month.
• ●True
• ●AND [2 of 4] : This town has lower taxes than my current home town.
• ●True
• ●AND [3 of 4] : This town has a lower cost of living index than my current home town.
• ●True
• ●AND [4 of 4] : This town has good housing for less than my maximum house budget.
• ●True
• ●AND [3 of 5] : This town has good work opportunities.
• ○OR [1 of 2] : This town has good fulltime work opportunities.
• ●OR [2 of 2] : This town has good freelance work opportunities.
• ●True
• ●AND [4 of 5] : This town provides a good quality of life.
• ●AND [1 of 2] : This town can provide a healthy lifestyle.
• ○OR [1 of 2] : This town has neighborhoods that provide a walkable urban lifestyle.
• ●AND [1 of 2] : This town has at least one neighborhood with a walkscore greater than 90.
• ●True
• ○AND [2 of 2] : The neighborhood with a walkscore greater than 90 has a crime rate no greater than 125% of the national average.
• ●OR [2 of 2] : This town has areas with affordable nature 'compounds'.
• ●True
• ●AND [2 of 2] : This town can provide an inspirational lifestyle.
• ●OR [1 of 3] : This town has a high quality university.
• ●True
• ○OR [2 of 3] : This town has cultural diversity.
• ●OR [3 of 3] : This town has beautiful scenery and views.
• ●False
• ●AND [5 of 5] : This town has good accessibility.
• ●AND [1 of 2] : This town is within 2 hours of a major airport.
• ●True
• ●AND [2 of 2] : This town is within 30 minutes of high quality hospitals.
• ●True

Storms Enroute to Dallas

Our travel day on May 2 was one of our worst ever - and we've traveled a lot. It was going to be a long day under the best of circumstances. We were driving from Oxford MS to Dallas, over 500 miles, to stay with family friends.

We knew that the Garmin was routing us on state roads instead of interstates for the first 100 miles, but we thought that was okay. It had worked fine for us the day before, on our way into Oxford. Our first mistake was not checking the weather forecast on the Internet before setting out that morning. If we had, we may have been smart enough to take another route. Lesson #1: always check the weather before setting out.

As it was, we encountered some of the worst weather I've ever seen. First the torrential downpours caused flash flooding on the back roads we were taking. There was one place shortly after crossing the Mississippi where we had to just keep moving forward hoping the car didn't stall. After that, we were never sure if we would run into a place where we had to turn back, effectively being stranded in rural Arkansas. Lesson #2: only take back roads in good weather.

Once we made it to the interstate, we were caught in stop-and-go traffic for five different accidents. The weather was treacherous, and one accident often caused another as cars tried to stop in the wet weather and poor visibility. We traded off driving several times, trying to stay alert.

Then we heard on CNN, over satellite radio, that there were tornadoes east of Dallas - right in our path. At this point, we called Sally, our friend in Dallas, to have her check the weather radar and tell us what we were heading into. For the next couple hours, Sally was our 'eye on the sky', and at one point we had to seek refuge in a Lowe's until the hardest downpours and a potential tornado passed over us. I asked the Lowe's employees (who were very nice) what their emergency tornado plan was; they didn't have one.

Finally, we thought we were in the clear to reach Dallas before the next band of storms hit. But at nine miles out the lightening became so severe I was ready to pull off and find shelter again. The lightening was everywhere, hitting straight to the ground, one even touching off a large blue fireball, probably from hitting a transformer. I was driving and wanted to stop, but Steve said no, just keep going, we're almost there. I pulled the cover forward over the sunroof, to lessen the flashes from the lightening (only from all sides now, not from above as well!), leaned forward to try to see the edges of the road, and drove the last miles - really, really frightened. I'm glad my dad doesn't have Internet access, because he'd really be upset with me if he read this. He raised me to know better than to be out on the road in this kind of weather.

Then we made it to our destination, and went inside -- leaving the car to be unloaded hours later, when the storm relented a little. Had a couple of beers. And were very glad the plan was to spend three days in Dallas, and not drive the whole time we were here. The rain gauge the next morning said the area had received five inches of rain the day before, and we had struggled with every inch of it.