ARIZONA

I think I began this blog by telling you that Kevin and I had many adventures this year right?  Of course, I don’t think anything can compare to our European adventure but we are having quite an adventurous year!  And it’s still going 🙂

Our next adventure lead us to an 8-day road trip across country.  We left our home after being there for just 3 short days and headed to Long Lake, Minnesota where we met up with John from Solo Dock.

Kevin had been talking with John for several months about a temporary dock for our place in Clearlake.  The original dock was partially destroyed in a storm a few years back. 

We began the process of rebuilding the dock but the county shut us down.  We knew we needed a permit but were hoping to get away with not purchasing one because the process takes so long.  But apparently, there is a new guy in the County office that has decided to enforce the old ordinance that your dock must be 10’ away from the property line and ours happens to be right on the property line.  And has been for probably 100 years.  So in order to repair our existing dock we have to move it over 10’ which is big bucks.  There is a whole process for appealing this ruling which we plan on going through but in the mean time we need a dock.  So we are looking into a temporary one.  They don’t require permits.  And they don’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Solo Dock

I can’t say we did a tour of Solo Dock because it was a very small warehouse about the size of a large bedroom but he did take us to his house on Lake Minnetonka.  There’s nothing real special about the lake but we were able to see his dock which was just like what we were purchasing.

Kevin found this guy and his company on the Internet and thought this kind of dock would be just what we needed.  All we had to do was send him a big fat check and our dock would arrive soon after.  

Ummmm ……. have you met me?  

I am paranoid of scams.  There was no way I was sending a guy with his own company in Minnesota a check in hopes of getting anything in return.  So we took a 12 hour journey to check him out.  I’d like to say it was on our way west but it’s mostly north.  It was worthwhile, we purchased our custom, temporary dock (meaning we can take it down and put it back up again whenever we please).

From there, we made our way south to Scottsdale, Arizona where we stayed for three days.

Arizona  

Arizona is one of my favorite states!  

It gets pretty warm there, like 112 degrees while we were there but it is dry, no humidity.  And that makes a huge difference, don’t you think?  It does for me.  It makes the difference of whether or not I can breathe.  We spent most of our time in the pool and it was very relaxing!

 

What I like so much about Arizona is the terrain.  It’s a desert with beautiful red rocks and mountains.  

I love how you can be driving on a highway and all of a sudden there is a mountain right next to the road.  Just one.  But it commands attention.  You can’t help but notice it.

My most favorite thing in Arizona?  My daughter lives there 🙂

Jillian moved to Scottsdale in March to work for a company as their property manager.  She has been doing this type of work for several years now.  It started in the Cleveland area where she worked for a few years and then she transferred and moved to Tampa, Florida for a year.  Tampa is also hot but very humid!

So she put out her feelers and landed a job in Scottsdale and she LOVES it!!

So we visited with her for a few days before we came up to Clearlake, our second home 🙂

Definitely my happy place!