Way Point After All

Heart Mountain at sunset from the house..........

Within a month of arriving in Cody LC and I had decided that we really liked this place and that this is where we wanted to stay.

We liked the quiet and honest and hard working and conservative people.

We liked the wide open spaces. 

The isolation. 

The fact that the entire population of the state is 1/2 million.

The fact that even Wyoming's big cities were actually little more than small towns.

Yellowstone and the Big Horns and Shoshone National Forest and Sunlight Basin and endless acres of public access Bureau of Land Management land were all so close and so accessible.

That we were surrounded by mountains and mountain ranges - all there for the exploring.

That in the Winter we could drive just outside of Cody and see large herds of elk and antelope and bison and big horn sheep.

That we could drive to town and drive through town and always see black tailed deer everywhere we looked.

We were always surprised and delighted to see a deer unexpectedly pop out of somebody's driveway or through somebody's bushes in their yard.

We had come to know the lone doe who wanders easily from pasture to pasture and yard to yard where we live.  Who is still watchful around us but who has come to know that she is safe to wander here.

The doe who wanders easily in the area with her two young fawns.  We watched them yesterday running across the road near the house, ducking underneath a fence and running in yet one more pasture.  One little one got left behind and we watched as he scrambled and bounced and bounded to catch up with him momma and sibling.  The babies have lost their spots.

I have watched as LC became more and more attached to Blackie and Smoky, even as I resolved (only partially successfully) that I would not get attached to them.

The wild mustangs just down the road, roaming free on thousands of acres of protected land..............

LC and Jamie and I are heading back to Tennessee in a few days.

We have had a renter in our house in Tennessee who paid regularly for almost a year and who recently has begun to not pay regularly.

Which means that for the past few months we have been paying rent here in Wyoming while also paying the mortgage for our house in Tennessee.

Which we cannot keeping doing.

She had reasons and we have given extensions and listened to broken promises and the property manager has not been proactive so we have been trying to deal with this all long distance and enough is enough.

I had a friend check on the house and thankfully it is all still in good shape.

We have told the renter to get out of the house by the end of September because we are concerned that if we do not get her out by then we will soon have difficulty evicting her and her son as we get closer to Winter.

We could find another renter but we don't want to do that.

There is nothing left in that town for us now aside from the house and it is time to do something with it............

For the past few months we have been exploring areas in Wyoming and researching on line and it has become increasingly obvious that land and homes are very expensive here.

More expensive than we can either afford or truthfully want to pay at this stage in our lives and we can buy much more land in Tennessee................

And it is time for me to go back and see my first born child.

I miss my son.  LC misses his daughter..............

We will be staying in a very old cabin on the property of a lady I used to work with in Tennessee until we get our renter out of the house.

We have a lot of things to do and not a lot of time to get it all done so this will be my last blog entry until we get back to Tennessee.

Cody Wyoming only turned out to be a way-point after all......................