My Travel Blog

After 10 days at my parents’ lake house, Nicole and I traveled to my sister and brother-in-law’s house at the Cape for the weekend (with Nicole doing the driving).

The Cape appeals to all five of my senses: the feel of the sand, sun, and breeze; the salty taste of the air and water; the sound of the waves; the ocean smell; and the views.  Oh, those ocean views.

In a couple days, I will be heading to my brother’s house in Wisconsin, and then we head back to the Cape for a week. Then I will head to D.C. in September to visit Meagan, to Florida in the spring to stay with family, and to North Carolina at some point to see my sisters.

We are known as the Moody Moochers.

There are only two drawbacks with being able to mooch off of this many people to go to this many places.

One, we tend to exhaust our hosts.

Two, I can’t keep up with the house. Specifically, the weeding. Especially because I’ve developed some arthritis in both knees as a result of being on my feet a lot more since giving up my desk job. I last an hour or two in the yard before I have to stop.  An hour or two would be adequate if I did so every day of the summer.  I do not do that since there are so many moochable places where I want to be.

I’ve come to realize there are two seasons when the house gets to me: weeding season and ice chipping season. And, while I can keep up with the house itself, if not the yard, the cost of maintaining a house this size is unappealing.

So, the new plan that I came up with while weeding is

1. Buy a smaller house with a smaller yard in town.
2. Have fun fixing it up.
3. Move into the perfected fixer-upper and sell this beautiful monstrosity.
4. In two or three years, sell the perfected fixer-upper and use our massive profit to move into our own vacation/retirement home on or near the water or other breathtaking view so that family moochers can exhaust us.