6/13/02 11:15 AM Pacific

Since the end is in site when it comes to this journal I'm going to try doing somewhat shorter entries rather than long ones, thereby saving my hand some pain. We are currently cruising at an altitude of about 33,000 feet and should be landing in Minneapolis/St. Paul in a little less than an hour. Then we'll have approximately an hour to find our way to our next flight and get ourselves on board.

Wednesday dawned bright and sunny just like nearly every other day we have been here. Have I mentioned how gorgeous the weather has been this whole time? The plan for this, our last full day in Washington, was to visit four Northeastern cities and one to three manufactured homes sales centers (plus the mall). We started on our way at 9:30 after grabbing some food from the hotel's continental breakfast.

The first stop on the day's travels was the city of Monroe. Of the four, Monroe is the one furthest to the South and East. I use the term "stop" somewhat loosely since in two of the towns we never even got out of the car. Monroe seemed like a nice enough little town, though it had the same agroindustrial feel that one finds in many small towns throughout the Midwest. This one just happened to have an occasional view of mountains. All the same it was a pretty area and will remain on our list of places we could see ourselves living. It gets a rating of 2, where 1 is is for cities we would definitely consider worth more of a look and two represents places we would live only if we could get a good deal on some really amazing land (quality or quantity). This rating is based mainly on the local urban center, since all of the land is beautiful and desirable.

From Monroe we then proceeded Northwest to the city of Snohomish. I will now take a five minute break to rest my hand. Snohomish was much nicer than Monroe and we actually got out of our car here. We spent about an hour wandering around a pair of antique and new furniture superstores. We went into those mainly because we wanted some place air conditioned to stretch our legs, but also because Snohomish is known as the antique capitol of the Pacific Northwest. While the town did not impress us as much as Woodinville did, we liked it well enough to give it a rating of 1, planning on doing much more extensive exploring once we have moved out there in a year or so. Another advantage to Snohomish is that it is due North of Woodinville and should only take about 15 to 20 minutes to drive from city to city. So if we can't find an affordable dream site in Woodinville at least Snohomish would be close and convenient.

As I'm typing this in there are a couple of things that have occurred to me concerning these towns that help to put them all into perspective for me. First of all, each of the four cities is slightly smaller in terms of population than Amherst. This definitely qualifies them as being small towns with all of the advantages therein. On top of that, Snohomish's proximity to Woodinville is almost exactly what Amherst's proximity to Oberlin is. So while it is not really a biking or walking distance, it is easy enough to drive that you can do it nearly as often as you want. That's a nice thought.

After departing Snohomish we continued on North/Northeast course to visit Lake Stevens. This town is almost due East of Everett and about 60-75% as far from Snohomish as Snohomish is from Woodinville. Lake Stevens is a town built around the lake for which it is named and has very little else going on. From what I hear summer water recreation is very big for the residents of this small town. Lauren found the small downtown and extensive residential areas to be very cute, and while I did too I'm not sure how long this interest would last if we lived there. The lake was very nice, though, and there were some excellent glimpses to be had of the North Cascades from time to time. Like Snohomish, Lake Stevens gets a 1.

Our final destination city was reached by heading Northeast from Lake Stevens. The town of Granite Falls was quite unremarkable as a town and barely merits that designation. It was certainly the smallest and least exciting of the four. In many ways it was similar to Concrete. What it did have was amazing views of several mountains, and any land we bought there would be guaranteed to have really awesome vistas. Granite Falls gets a 2.

Just for a reference point I should probably give Woodinville a rating since I've already said how much we liked it there. Woodinville gets a 1a. The "a" indicates that while living there would be great, the cost of living would be substantially higher. This is a pretty big caveat, considering. I'm really hoping that Snohomish comes through in the long run since it has the best access to Woodinville as well as the other cities we like.

We've started our descent a good bit earlier than scheduled so I'm going to close this entry and stow my notebook away. I'll resume on the next flight.