We traveled around the country for about nine months. We were in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Eureka, California. I was too young to even know that I was supposed to think. I remember traveling along route 66, singing the song, in a Volkswagen bug with all our earthly posessions. We went from motel to motel, or sometimes we get a small apartment.

During the day I would busy myself by going to the library and reading. We usually eat out because Bill was on an expense account. I enjoyed all of this but I was too out of it to even know that this was a good thing. I wish I could do it all again!

And, we had two cats with us in our Volkswagen bug. It was just unreal.

On the way back from California we blew the engine of the Volkswagen. While we were in California the engine was acting up. We were living at that time in an apartment complex with other couples who were in this training program. We actually took the engine out of the car and put it in the back seat at night.

I like mechanics as much as Bill does, so we would do things together. He has a picture of me under the car all greasy and messed-up. We rebuilt the engine, put it back in the car, and it lasted from California to Indianapolis. We blew the engine in Indianapolis. As luck would have it, we were in Indianapolis during Memorial Day so we got to see the Indy 500.

We got back to New York and Bill started working for Air Preheater in Wellsville, New York.

We bought our first house for $14,700.00. It was beautiful. It was on 1.5 acres of land. We started raising a family. We were in Wellsville, and we had an oil well in our backyard. We didn’t have the mineral rights to it but we had to keep our kids out of the black yuck. We were right on the border between Pennsylvania and New York.

So we had two daughters there. Then, when I was about five months pregnant Bill and decided to go and finish his master’s degree. We moved from our house to an apartment in Rochester ,New York where we stayed for six months. That’s where our third daughter was born.

After she was born, that very next week, we moved down to Kingston so that Bill could start teaching at Ulster county community college.

I kind of enjoyed all the moving. While the kids were growing up we lived in thirteen or fourteen different houses. After about a year and a half of being in one house, the children would start to ask: “when are we moving?”

At that point of Bill was going from his master’s degree in to teaching. It was only a one-year job. He was lucky enough to get with General Electric. Bill worked with G. E. Up in Schenectady New York for five years. Then he relies to that gee the Schenectady was going to go downhill and start laying people off in the near future.

So Bill asked for a change, and the game is a choice of California or Texas. We chose Texas, and that was a culture shock!

We left New York in 1977 thinking that we were very, very conservative people. We knew that the Vietnam War had happened but it didn’t faze us much. We had little toddlers.

When we got to Texas we were considered ultra-liberals. This was during the sun-boom in Texas and we would see people driving around with bumper stickers on their card that read: “Yankee go home!”

Texas didn’t welcome us. But the kids enjoyed the sunshine. We moved south of Dallas to a little town that we liked called Desoto. Then our daughters got involved with gymnastics north of Dallas. So I was transporting them about a one hour ride each way Several times a week. It just didn’t make sense, so we moved from Desoto to Farmer’s Branch north of Dallas.

When the children started high school we made a promise to them that we wouldn’t move until they were all out of high school. We kept our promise, much to the chagrin of Bill who got tired of GE. It just wasn’t challenging anymore.

I had just got my bachelor’s degree and had started working for Control Data. It took me twenty years to get that degree and I finally got it in 1984. I wanted to see if I could go up the ladder in control data. I felt good having a professional job. But after five years I realized That I wasn’t going to go anywhere.

Not long after I left, control data began to experience problems. They became Ceridian, and I think now they’ve gone away.

Two of our daughters were in the University of Oklahoma when we moved to Klamath Falls, Oregon. Bill started teaching, and I became a housewife. It was nice; I did a lot of volunteer work in Klamath Falls.

We thought that we might retire in Klamath Falls; it was a beautiful house. After three years Bill was asked to leave and we moved up to Olympia, Washington. Bill started teaching at Saint Martin’s college. That gave me the opportunity to go back to school and get my teaching certificate.

My mother always used to say: “there’s always a good reason for the way things happen.”

When I got my teaching certificate the market for teachers in Olympia was a surplus of a surplus of a surplus. I did a lot of substitute teaching because not many substitutes want calculus. I did quite a bit of it and I enjoyed it.

Bill retired from Saint Martin’s college and we bought the property in Prineville, Oregon. We decided that would be our retirement home. We wanted to have a very small footprint on the earth. That’s when we came up with the idea of the solar home off-grid.

We had always wanted a log cabin but it just didn’t work. It turns out that stick construction was better.

So we designed our new home this way. I sat down and thought about the thirteen or fourteen different homes we had and decided which aspects of each home that I liked. We designed the home just the way we wanted it for passive solar, active solar, and then we built it ourselves!

Both Bill and I enjoy doing things. In fact when we go to our children’s homes we like to have a list of things we can do for them so that we feel productive.

Bills father was that way, too. We always had a list of things for him to do because he couldn’t sit still. It’s time to pay back. Or pay forward. I think our kids will adopt this. After all, we were brats when we were first married too.

When we were first married we were into ourselves. We thought the world revolved around us.

So now we have our home in Oregon and lots of friends there. We have a good church family. Bill would move here to Todos Santos, Mexico, and live here year round but I can’t. It might be because Prineville, Oregon is the first place where I have truly felt at home. Todos Santos is beginning to feel like home but I think it will take awhile.

Right now our plan is to spend winters in Mexico and the rest of the time in Oregon. We will see.