Home Sweet…Trumansburg?
It’s official – we finally have a place to call home – a real apartment, not a bedroom on wheels. It’s got walls, doors, a few sinks, a fridge. A stove that doesn’t fold up into a suitcase. A roof and a porch. It even has two toilets. TWO toilets! Our toilet count will shortly increase by like 200%!! In two weeks, home will be a two bedroom duplex in the cute little town of Trumansburg, NY.
Wait a second…haven’t we been talking about moving to Ithaca for the last few months? What’s with this Trumansburg place?
It turns out that people don’t like to lease apartments in the winter. After following up on a few places in downtown Ithaca and striking out, we started looking at the surrounding towns. And the places were nicer, and cheaper, and felt less like a repeat of our college days. We had the typical conversation that people have when they consider moving to the suburbs: “Wow, look at all this space!” “This place is so much nicer than the moldy dump downtown, and it’s $100/month cheaper!” “There’s even a bus line that runs into Ithaca every half hour!”
That decided it. We’d try small-town living in Trumansburg, population 1,800, ten miles northwest of Ithaca, a place where we’d need to get a P.O. Box for mail but where we would be on city water. A town with a real NY style pizza shop, a few bars, a few restaurants, a coffee shop, a liquor store, some cute shops where we’ll exercise our window shopping skills, a farmer’s market, and a library, all within a five minute walk of our apartment. A few minutes outside town there are a bunch of wineries, a cidery, Taughannock Falls State Park, and Cayuga Lake. It’s not too big, not too small…it’s just right.
When we rolled into Kansas City in August, I didn’t want our trip to ever end. But the past two months have been tough – we’ve been staying in other people’s homes with our stuff in boxes and bags scattered between Wisconsin, Illinois, and New York. The van wasn’t home anymore, and we felt the absence of that home intensely. We went from being completely free to being completely on other peoples’ schedules. The idea of once again having our own space became more and more precious, something we’d talk about before falling asleep at night. We are insanely excited to move into our new apartment. I’ve been lying awake at night, daydreaming about how we’ll arrange the space. The two weeks we need to wait to move in feel interminable.
But…we only signed a ten month lease, meaning that we’ll be loose again in September, our historical month of new adventures. What then?
