Arriving in Chicago

My wife, Rhonda, and I are now in our new apartment in Chicago, about 1/2 mile from Sears Tower. Rhonda is especially thrilled to be living in a large city and is really enjoying all the things to do out here. I suspect Chicago will eventually return to normal once Rhonda settles in :-)

What's left of our furniture arrives from Colorado tomorrow, so this is the last night of staring at the walls. We decided to sell off a lot of the furniture prior to the move and purchase new stuff on this end. The main reason was that we had a much bigger place in Colorado and will need smaller/fewer items in an apartment. The large dresser, armoire, desks, couches, chaise, etc., are being replaced with their condensed equivalents. No doubt this will be an interesting change for us.

Spearfish, SD

My wife and I recently drove from Loveland, CO to Chicago, IL as part of our relocation for a new job with Citadel Investment Group in Chicago. The shortest route appeared to be taking Interstate 80 through Nebraska and Iowa for the West to East portion of the trip. Instead, we took Interstate 90 through South Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

We lived in South Dakota from late 1996 to mid 1998 and wanted to drop by the little town we lived in to see how it had changed. We also wanted to go through the Deadwood area of South Dakota again, where we visited a very nice B&B in 1997, and thoroughly enjoyed the area. As soon as we hit Spearfish, we knew we would be living in South Dakota again some how, some way.

While traveling through Spearfish we knew why we loved the area so much. From the moment we were in South Dakota, there were several herds of deer along the highway, the scenery is second to none and the overall peacefulness just makes you want to stay in the area.

We're in the beginning stages of selling our house to some close friends of our neighbor and it is essentially a property swap. They are buying our house and we're buying their mobile home. The plan is to purchase their mobile home with proceeds from the sell of our house and move the mobile home to South Dakota. We'll keep the mobile home in its current location until we find a piece of property we can purchase in South Dakota, then move the mobile home. This would basically be our retirement location. We'll probably keep the mobile home on the lot for several years, then build a house. Even if we never get to the house portion, we know we'll have a mobile home that we can always enjoy. We're just learning about moving a mobile home, so we're sure there will be some gotchas along the way.