Colorado Bound
24 October 2006We decided over the summer that Colorado may be our next home. We definitely don’t want to stay in Vallejo for the rest of our lives, much less raise kids here. For the longest time we thought the Pacific Northwest would be our destination based solely on the amount of family living there already, but ruled it out because of a little known issue with rainfall.
Colorado sounded like it had the right blend of outdoor adventure and advanced civilization. As is our nature we started voraciously researching every town and city within reasonable distance of either Fort Collins or Louisville, which are two places my company currently has offices. We got videos from builders, read reviews, compared crime and education statistics and I bugged the heck out of an old friend who lives in CO for information. We made spreadsheets for analysis and progress tracking, and we booked flight reservations to check out the lay of the land. We were obsessed.
I purposely made the reservations a few months out so we’d have time not only to digest the mountain of information, but also allow any false sense of urgency to dissipate. We can be quite impulsive at times, and had we gone out to CO right away I have little doubt that we would have come back with a new mortgage in hand. The four month window allowed us to more thoroughly research other towns that weren’t on our radar originally, and cross out others that didn’t hold up to scrutinization. More importantly, the passage of time allowed us to step back and look at the big picture in terms of timing and finances. It worked. Until now…
We’re about a week and a half out from our visit and the obsession is starting again. It was inevitable. We need to hammer out the final details, make sure we’re checking out the right towns and try to optimize the less then two days we’ll be there. We’re back to spending a disproportionate amount of time on the internet, pumping my friend in CO for information (Thanks, Heather!) and somehow managing to find even more towns to add to our list. It’s crazy, and it’s just who we are. I don’t really try to fight it. In fact, I embrace it, but I still don’t want to come home with a new mortgage. I seem to recall saying those words to Drew on New Years Day 2004 when we looked at some homes “for fun”. We closed on our house 45 days later.