Girl Trip 2023 - Kansas City Style

Denisa, her mother, and her two sisters have been going on girl trips for the last thirty years. While we have driven or flown all over the country in those thirty years, our annual trips have gotten simpler in recent years. Denisa's 93-year-old mother requested a trip to Kansas City this year. Her priorities were to see our new house, and to visit with our son's family. One of Denisa's sisters also requested a stop at Baskin Robbins, because they no longer have these yummy stores in Oklahoma.

We went to Kansas City on a girl trip about ten years ago when Mother was more mobile. On that trip we went to the Arabia Steamboat Museum, the World War I Museum, the downtown Union Station--lots of the best tourist stops in Kansas City that we still recommend. But this trip centered more on family time. We thought this was a cute picture of 5-year-old Carter escorting her grandmother and great grandmother into church on Sunday morning.

Because nap time has to be scheduled into girls trip these days, we also had to have a quiet activity. Who knew that our exciting girl trips would now include putting together a 1000-piece puzzle?

The highlight of our trip was attending a dinner theater performance. The New Theatre and Restaurant in Overland Park is actually not new. It's 51 years old. The building is new, and features tiered seating and lighting so that every seat is a good one. We enjoyed the buffet meal, and our young daughter-in-law joined the old girls for this part of the girl trip. After we finished the all-you-can-eat buffet with choices like Pasta Fusilli, Golden Fried Basa, and Pan Asian chicken, we settled in for the live theatre production. We enjoyed "Always a Bridesmaid" starring Morgan Fairchild.

We ate out and played cards, and Denisa was glad to share her grandchildren with her mother and sisters. Her sisters have graciously shared their grandchildren with us over the years while we waited for our own. It wasn't a really exciting adventure for Girl Trip 2023, but it was good food and good fun and good fellowship. That's the best ingredients for a successful girl trip!

Autumn Invitations

While we have kept busy with projects to get our new house in order, we won't turn down an invitation for fun. Autumn was full of good family invitations. For example, our son's family invited us to the Apple festival in Weston, Missouri.

The first stop was the Red Barn Farm, where we enjoyed riding the pony and feeding the animals.

We tried the apple cider donuts and bought ornamental gourds on this beautiful-weather October weekend.

Our younger son made another trip to Kansas City, so he got to enjoy the apple festival as well.

Downtown Weston was decked out in all things autumn, with plenty of photo opportunities.

While the boys headed home for college football games and nap time, the girls went to the orchard to pick fresh apples.

There are few things sweeter than a juicy tree-ripened apple that was just picked. The orchard owners encouraged us to try one right off the tree. 

We also got an October invitation to fly to Houston for the Texas fall band competition. Kansas City has a brand new airport that opened in 2023, and we looked forward to experiencing it for ourselves. The art inside the airport is big and beautiful.

Our nephew and niece picked us up at the Houston airport and treated us to five days of fun. We got to play some pickleball in their warm October weather down south.

But the timing of our trip was determined by the band competition that their two oldest children were competing in that weekend. The band first performed at the local high school game. This is Texas--where everything is bigger and high school football is big league. The stadium had a jumbotron, and the players entered the stadium through a three-story inflatable entry and smoke. Welcome to Texas high school football! The football team was pretty good, but we have to say that the band's half-time show was even better!

The big event was the Saturday band competition. We watched as these 6A schools put on flashy shows. The Woodlands high school marched 300 students on the field. Besides all the buses to transport that many band students, it takes three more eighteen-wheel trucks to transport the huge props that are part of this elaborate show. They have five minutes to get everything on the field, eight minutes for the high-energy show, and then two minutes to get off the field. The Woodlands band made the finals, so we were back in the evening to see the top ten bands perform again. It was a great treat! 

While the judges tabulated the results, all ten of the bands lined up on the football field. We were excited to see that The Woodlands band got first place and will continue on to state finals in a week. (Spoiler alert--at state they qualified for nationals in Indianapolis. There they came home with an impressive fifth place finish at the grand national competition.)

We flew back to Kansas City just in time to see some of the best fall color of the year. 

The trees on our street were at peak color.

The view from our back deck included a kaleidoscope of autumn reds, oranges, and yellows.

We got back to Kansas City just in time for another important October invitation--to Eli's third birthday. We now have a three-year-old in our family!

After being in very warm Houston, we got a bit of a jolt of how cold it can get in the Kansas City area in October. We were wearing gloves and coats for the final game of the fall soccer season. While everyone else was watching the game, Gram was keeping Eli busy by reading books.

We got another invitation, so we made another autumn trip. This time we were headed just west of Wichita, Kansas, where our great niece was the female lead in her high school musical. She made a beautifully green Fiona in the Shrek Musical, and we were so impressed with the talent in this show's cast. Of course, Elliott was the highlight. Her years of dance and voice training, and lots of natural talent really made her look like a professional!

Just a few days later we got to celebrate another autumn activity. We started the morning of October 31 at Carter's school. That cold snap caused us to bring out our big wool coats that haven't been out of the closet for many years. But Carter didn't even need a jacket when she walked by during the school costume parade. She's Isabelle from the movie Encanto. This character has long dark hair and turns everything she touches into flowers.

Eli loves dinosaurs, so he was a blue T Rex.

Our son Luke was also in the dinosaur theme, but his costume was riding a dinosaur. He was also carrying a shy blue T Rex that didn't exactly understand what halloween was all about. 

But when he figured out that all the neighbors were giving out candy, he suddenly was no longer shy. This little blue dinosaur took Grand-dude's hand and walked all over their little neighborhood.

Yes, it's been an autumn full of great family activities. It feels like we're in a good place enjoying some great invitations!

We bought a house--now the real work begins!

After a week of pondering if this was the right house for us, we signed a contract. Now the real work begins! We had really gotten to know the owners' daughter that was selling the house, and she trusted us. So even though the closing date was still a couple weeks away, we started tackling some of the projects around the house. One of those was the gutter system. Instead of funneling the rain water away from the house, it was disconnected and the water was flowing under the driveway and sidewalk. That will have to be repaired, so Mark started working on the gutters to make sure that this drainage problem wouldn't happen again.

He thought digging the trench to bury the drainage pipe would be a simple half-day project. He was glad to find a shovel in the garage to do the digging. But then he got his first lesson in Kansas rocky soil. He was glad to find two pick axes that were also in the garage inventory. It took two days of chipping away at the rocks to make that trench. If something happened so that we didn't actually close on this house, he donated some hard labor.

At the same time that Mark was digging ditches outside, Denisa was inside cleaning the kitchen. Remember that we were buying this house "as is." That included treasures (and junk) throughout the house. The family left all the cabinets full of dishes. After living in a motor home with four plates, four bowls, and four glasses, Denisa was overwhelmed. She found a set of eight place settings, and another with twelve. She found everything from a crock pot to a griddle to a food processor to a blender. All the appliances that didn't fit in a motor home were left in this house. We worked for several days after our son and daughter-in-law returned from Switzerland and they took over child-care duties. We did stop working long enough to celebrate Denisa's birthday with a home-cooked steak dinner and coconut cream pie from a local bakery.

In the middle of this busy time, we also got to spend good time with our children and grandchildren. We vowed that we wouldn't pass up any invitations from them. So when they called to ask if Gram wanted to go with the girls to a pumpkin festival, she was all in.

Then it was time to make the trip to Oklahoma to pick up some of our belongings to put in this house. Nine years ago we gave things away and we didn't keep anything in storage. But some of our things are returning now that we will have a home again. Some of our best things burned in the wild fire that destroyed Denisa's Mother's house a year ago. But we still had a few things at Mark's Mother's house and at Denisa's sister's house. We rented a u-haul trailer to get them from Oklahoma to Kansas City. Denisa is a bit of a planner, and she cut out scaled versions of each furniture piece to make sure they would fit inside the trailer.

Some things were in the barn hay loft, and the rest were upstairs in Mark's Mother's house. But we managed to carry them all down all those steps and got them loaded in the u-haul. The sun was setting when we hitched up to the trailer that was filling up.

We drove on to Oklahoma City to pick up a large antique armoire and another old dresser that Denisa's sister and brother-in-law had been graciously storing for us. We were surprised to remember how many boxes of photo albums and scrapbooks were stored in that armoire. But Mark and Joe kept packing things in that u-haul trailer until everything fit. We even got the little play kitchen cabinets that Denisa's father made for his three daughters over sixty years ago. They were headed to Kansas City for another generation to play with.

We closed on the house on October 4, and our son helped us to unload the trailer. Now more of the real work began as we started the cleaning. Those that follow the blog know that Mark is known to climb up treacherous mountain paths and out over tall ledges. He channeled that adventurous spirit when cleaning out the tall ledges that haven't been touched in a while.

The ceilings in the bathroom and the entryway are crazy tall. The last owners were an elderly couple who weren't able to climb to the top of the ladder and stretch up to those heights. So the new "elderly couple" owners were finding 14-year-old dust to clean.

Instead of climbing mountains, Mark was climbing trees to get on top of our very tall house. A native elm was allowed to sprout and grow too close to the house. So Mark was up on the roof to trim the branches. Another adventurous project will be removing this sizable tree.

We continued to find things that we would need. Yes, there was a big shop-vac in the basement, and a full set of cleaning supplies. We also found an angel food cake pan, Christmas decorations, rakes, a full set of rubbermaid storage containers, and a whole collection of Boyd's bears. We found lots of things that we didn't need, and we made many trips to the local goodwill store to share our bounty with others.

All of our kids have been great to help! Our oldest son and our daughter-in-law showed up with their lawn mower to do our yard. Our younger son came to help with some heavy projects. But, again we made sure we stopped to have fun. It was pure joy to have the whole family together, playing in the parks and walking the trails in the new town where we just bought a house.

It's just 2.4-miles to our son's house. So when they called to invite us over for breakfast crepes we were there in five minutes.

We are spending lots of time cleaning and sorting through the contents of our new home. It's a new adventure and a new stage of life for us. But we don't plan to be here all the time. We still have lots of traveling to do. Our travels might be a little shorter in duration and take different forms, but we still plan to continue to wander God's wonders--even though we bought a house and the real work has begun. 

Is it time to settle down and buy a house?

After living in the motor home for almost nine years, we've started feeling like it was important to spend more time with our children and grandchildren. Is it time to settle down and buy a house? We have enjoyed staying at our children's houses, and they have always made us feel very welcome. We have also stayed in the motor home at campgrounds near their homes for longer stays. But all the campgrounds around Kansas City are about a 45-minute drive from where our grandchildren live. That convinced us that if we bought property we wanted it to be closer to all this cuteness.

We started looking for property in the Kansas City area about a year ago. We envisioned an acreage a few miles out of town where we could put in a RV site with electric, water, and sewer hookups for the motor home. We could use those utilities in the future to build a house on that acreage. But we soon found that nice plots of land had already been snatched up by developers paying huge prices. We also learned that any plots within city limits had ordinances against parking an RV on them. 

So we moved on to Plan B. That would be to look for a nice house outside of city limits where we could park our motor home beside it. We drove the back roads encircling Lenexa and other towns in the area. We found out that a brand new battery manufacturing plant was being built nearby, and they were gearing up to employ thousands of people. The housing market was going crazy! We didn't find anything we liked that we could afford in the country.

We went to a few open houses and the parade of homes last spring. We got to know the area, as well as the housing market. We walked neighborhoods and met some really friendly people that made us feel welcome. When we found a house and a neighborhood that we really liked, we found that houses sell fast. Within hours of coming on the market, the sellers might have five offers over the asking price, and some of them were cash offers. This was going to be more competitive and harder than we thought!

We left for our summer travels, knowing that we couldn't do anything while we were on the road. But we got daily updates on houses coming onto the market through the zillow app. We really hoped that the perfect house didn't show up on those listings, because we were too far away to do anything about it. 

After months of following the area housing market, we came to a better understanding of what we really wanted. At our age, we thought it was important to have all of our living areas on one level. While stairs are no problem for us now, we planned to live in this house for the long haul. Our son has a large house that is great for big family gatherings, so we wanted a small house. That should be cheaper to buy and cheaper to heat and cool. Three bedrooms and two bathrooms would be plenty for us. Since we have almost no furniture, that would also mean less furniture to have to buy to fill it up. We made a list of all the things we would have to buy immediately: a refrigerator, washer and dryer, living room furniture, dining table and chairs, beds . . . Making all those purchases right away sounded very expensive and very intimidating. We also preferred that this house be less than ten miles away from our son's house, and hopefully on an easy-to-drive route. We preferred a  neighborhood with big trees, but we also wanted a house that was less than 25 years old. We have learned that almost all new housing in this area is multi-level, and most have a basement. We preferred an unfinished basement that would give us good storage and a place for our grandchildren to play.

Once we arrived in the Kansas City area to baby sit, we started looking in earnest. We started by looking at five houses that filled some of our wish list items, but ruled them all out upon further inspection. We found that autumn was a slower time for home purchases, and fewer people put their houses on the market in the fall. We were keeping track of all the new listings, but found nothing. . . until . . .

We saw a brand new zillow listing that was "for sale by owner." Even though we were baby-sitting, we took Eli with us to see the house for the first time. That's him, standing at the end of the driveway with the "for sale" sign in the front yard.

We situated him in the living room with some plastic dinosaurs to play with, and we took a few pictures of the inside of the house.

It checked a lot of our boxes. It was small--with three bedroom and two bathrooms. The kitchen and dining area and living room were all connected in an open floorplan. All the living areas were on one level.

Down the steps was a full unfinished walk-out basement. That was the exact combination we preferred.

For people (like us a year ago) that aren't familiar with the Kansas City-preferred housing style, this is what the back side of a house with a walk-out basement looks like. This city was built on rolling hills, and houses have sprouted up on the sides of those hills with sloping yards.

The house was built in 2009, so it checked the box for being within our preferred age. It's at the top of a nice cul-de-sac that doesn't get much traffic. The best part was that the front door was just 2.4 miles away from our son's house, down an easy-to-drive street. We were feeling pretty hopeful.

The house was owned by an older couple, who had purchased it new. They both passed away in the last 18 months, and their daughter decided to avoid realtor fees because she would rather sell it herself. She planned to have an estate sale to get rid of all the furnishings. But because we own almost nothing, we decided to make an offer "as is." The good news was that the family had left a lot of things that we would need to set up housekeeping in a sticks and bricks house again. The house would come with a refrigerator, washer, and dryer. It also had a dining room table and chairs, a love seat, recliners, some end tables, etc. That would make our list of things that had to be purchased right away a lot shorter. The bad news was that we wouldn't need a lot of the things that were left in this messy basement and garage. The kitchen and bed rooms also had lots of boxes and cabinets still filled with the couple's lifetime accumulations.

There were a few things that the family would still be taking--like those ladders that we really could use. But the rest of the stuff would take a lot of time and effort to sort through, and getting rid of the things we wouldn't keep would be a pain.

We had a building inspection, and found only a few things that needed to be fixed. The situation was complicated by the fact that we were baby-sitting. We had a schedule to keep that included school drop offs and pickups, and Eli's afternoon nap schedule. We were the busiest we had been since our own children were 5 and 2. What a time to be seriously looking at a house!?! We bathed the purchase decision in prayer and had some sleepless nights pondering our future and how this house might be a part of that. Is it time to settle down and buy a house?