How We Got Here

Karen and I moved to Vermont when I accepted the position as AVP/CIO at the University of Vermont in January, 2006.  We bought a townhouse under construction and had it upgraded to be our "forever home" -- we planned to retire and stay there.  Williston is 4 hrs from Karen's kids and mom, and we love Vermonters and Vermont.  Vermont seemed like the perfect place for us to live in after retirement, and we love our home, our neighbors and neighborhood, and the people and the state of Vermont.

So it was a surprise when, after about 3 months in our new home, Karen said "I miss Montana".

I hadn't realized how much she loved Montana.  I should have.  When I took the position in San Diego in the summer of 2000, she stayed in Bozeman one last summer to enjoy Montana.  For 4 or so years after leaving Bozeman, she wouldn't return for a visit -- afraid it would hurt too much, she now tells me.  It became clear that her "I miss Montana" statement wasn't just a casual remark: it was a serious plea to return "home".

So we started talking about returning West when I retired from UVM.  I wanted Santa Fe -- new place, new adventures, a bit warmer, different cultures.  Karen wanted to return to Bozeman.  Since I had loved my four years in Bozeman, too, we settled on Bozeman as our first place to live in the West after retirement (I'm still angling for Santa Fe or San Luis Obispo next).

We started visiting Bozeman once a year.  We looked, casually, for a home.  Karen wanted something low-maintenance -- no lawn to keep up, for example, and a new place that didn't require much maintenance.  Our old home, 2 Park Plaza, came up for sale a couple of times during our visits, and we almost bought it the second time -- the owners were offering it at a really good price.  But it required too much repair (they'd let their kids and dogs do some damage) and ongoing maintenance.  So we contacted our realtor friend Patrick, who'd both sold us 2 Park Plaza and sold 2 Park Plaza for us when we moved to San Diego.  He showed us around a bunch of places, but none clicked.  Finally he showed us a development about a mile southeast of the University, a group of 100 townhomes in "South Meadow", in a larger development of individual homes.  Patrick ended up buying one of the townhomes he showed us, one of the larger models, but Karen was more interested in one of the mid-sized units, and Patrick showed us a new one that we really liked.  So in August, 2011, we bought a new townhouse in South Meadow.  It's about 2100 sq ft, about 700 sq ft smaller than our home in Williston, but it's all one level (better for my knees) and easy to maintain.  It's in a planned community, so landscape maintenance is (mostly) done by the Association.  All in all, a pretty comfortable place to set up as a retirement home over a couple of years (I wasn't ready to retire yet).

We couldn't afford to keep two homes, so we'd intended to keep only one household of furniture and sell the Williston home and move furniture to Bozeman upon retirement.  We did buy chairs for the kitchen island -- 4 of them, so we can have (and have had) dinner guests.  And we bought a sectional sofa with a pull-out, air-mattress bed, so we can put up guests (who'll likely be out sightseeing all day and won't miss having other furnishings!  :-) ).  But we have an air mattress in the master bedroom: otherwise empty.  As Karen says, we're camping out -- in style, but just camping out!

So, here's our living room.  The (gas) fireplace is modeled after the 1870 entrance to Yellowstone at Gardiner, MT, down Paradise Valley from Livingston.  The wood is knotty alder.  The prints are by Nancy Young, Albuquerque; we saw her work about 5 years ago and didn't buy any, but we were back there last summer and bought two for the house (and one as a birthday gift for Karen).

Over the first two years we owned it, we were able to visit just 3 times.   We'd ship stuff out to Patrick (just down the street), then arrive, unpack the boxes to set up house, do some sightseeing, and return to Vermont.  But in January, 2013, I formally announced my intention to retire at the end of the fiscal year, and we started making plans to move to Bozeman.

We decided that if our Williston home didn't sell, we'd return there in October for the 2013-14 winter, and there were no early bites on that home.  So, again, we didn't move furniture, but (with some vacation time to burn up) we left Vermont on 20 June and drove, visiting friends and family along the way (and dropping quarts of genuine Vermont maple syrup as we visited!), staying in Erie, PA; with the Sheehans in Bloomington, IN; in Columbia, MO for two nights; in Des Moines for one night; in Ogallala, NE, one night; delightful drive up the Platte River along the Oregon Trail and then down the Wind River Canyon to stay in Thermopolis, WY one night.  We'd planned to finish with a flourish and drive through Cody, west over the Chief Joseph Highway through Sunlight Basin and over Dead Indian Pass, and then over the Beartooth Highway to Red Lodge MT and on home.  But Lily was desperately anxious after 7 days on the road, so we took a faster route and just drove north from Cody to Belfry MT, over to Red Lodge, and then to Columbus -- one of our favorite drives, and an absolutely glorious re-introduction to Montana -- and then via I-90 to home.

We arrived in Bozeman on Thursday, 27 June.  Boxes awaited us, and we had a very well packed Subaru to unload, but after a couple of days we had things put away and some new purchases made and were settling into our new (largely empty) home:  Karen, Lily, and me.

I had planned to start retirement by replacing our old personal Macs with new ones, so we had a Macbook Air waiting for Karen and a Mac Mini waiting for me.  After getting other necessary household things taken care of, I spent a couple of days backing the old systems up, transferring accounts, apps, and files to the new systems, and cleaning off and reimaging the old systems to ship to friends back in Vermont.  I also had to clean off my UVM laptop and reimage it before shipping back to UVM.  So a couple of days of techie work, interspersed with household chores (not many -- Karen did most of it, and the place was in pretty good shape from when we left it -- and not much in the house to clean!).

So, that's how we got here.

In future posts, I'll capture both my impressions of Montana now and my sense of how Bozeman (if not Montana) has changed in 13 years.  My first impression is that Bozeman, at least, is very different.  I had (still have) a great deal of trepidation about returning to Bozeman.  It's a very conservative culture, politically and socially.  So while Montanans are absolutely wonderful on a personal level -- incredibly friendly and helpful -- Montana's political and social environment grate on my nerves.  In that sense, I'm very much a Vermonter, and the move here worried me.

But we'll see.  Things may be different.   And in any case, there are compensating offsets that make this a wonderful place to live.

So, next time, I'll see if I can capture my first impressions of returning to Bozeman.