The Jet Set Betties

Happy mid-holidays, friends! We hope you have had safe travels, festive times, and lots of holiday cheer. As we type this, we’re both wrapped in blankets watching a winter storm bluster across Lake Michigan and attempt to topple our construction-site outhouse. Good thing we have one working toilet in the house! More on that in a moment….

Speaking of wind, the last five months have been full and breezy, and it’s remarkable to take this moment to catch our breath and reflect on it all a bit. But we can’t relax too long because this week we need to pack our stuff and return semi-permanently to Sitka! That’s right – if all goes to plan, on January 10 we’ll arrive in Sitka and move back into our house! Prepare yourselves, Alaska friends!

But enough forward-looking, this is a time of reflection, so let’s catch up on the Betties’ antics of the last few months.

Lake House Construction

If you’ve been following our story this year, you know that one of the through-lines is our involvement with the remodel of Kayla’s sister’s cottage on Lake Michigan. We’ve spent a lot of time in this house over the last four years. It’s become our home base in the Lower 48 in-between our other wanderings.

During this time, Iris decided she wanted to turn this summer cottage into a year-round home, and – because we’re suckers for a good house project – we happily agreed to help. Her vision included a small addition to create a better entryway plus one more main floor bathroom; remodel the existing bathroom; install new insulated windows; upgrade all systems (plumbing, electrical, HVAC); and give a facelift to the adorable little guest cabin that sits separately from the main house.

Matthew helped locate a fantastic local building company to help with the big stuff, and they moved on-site in mid-September. Prior to their work and continuing in tandem with the professional crew, Matthew has been the on-site liaison for Iris while also taking on several of the “smaller” projects (like building interior window trim for all 16 new windows and tiling the shower in the guest cabin). We’ve also accepted painting duty, so we’re spending these two weeks painting as many new surfaces as we can before we head to Alaska. The professional crew won’t finish their work until mid-January (tiling and cabinetry are the big remaining items), so we plan to return here in late April to put finishing touches on whatever needs it.

The power was turned off for at least 6 weeks, and prior to Dec 12 there was no running water or functional toilet in the house (hence the port-a-john on the property that’s now being threatened by winter winds). By mid-December, just before the professional crew moved out for their 2-week break, hot water was restored, one toilet on the 2nd floor is functional, and a shower was hooked up in the main bathroom. Here are a few photos from this process; scroll down for headlines from the other adventures we’ve had since August.

AUGUST

Kayla and her sisters went to Chicago to see niece Kristina in an opera. Then Kristina came to visit us in Michigan for a week.

Meanwhile, a new part-time job swept Matthew to Anchorage for 48 hours in August. The Legislature has created a Joint Legislative Task Force on Education Funding, and hired Matthew to shepherd the process and write the final report. This turns out to be kind of a big deal. The Task Force will meet regularly for the next year, with the final report due just in time for a new legislature and a new governor to get things going in January 2027. If he does a decent job, Matthew will know a whole lot about the AK Ed Funding landscape, which we hope will land him an interesting job in-state to occupy his waning useful years.

In late August, after rearranging all the furniture in the lake house as final prep for construction, we took off for two weeks in Minneapolis and northwest Iowa.

September

The main event of our midwest trip was a full Boettcher family gathering in Kayla’s hometown of Storm Lake, Iowa. You may recall that her dad has been in the process of finding new homes for his things, and ultimately finding a new owner for his home – the house he and Kayla’s mom built from scratch when they retired from farming in 1996. Over Labor Day weekend, all 14 members of Kayla’s family came together in Storm Lake for a “house-cooling” event, complete with digitizing 60+ years of family photos (and enjoying stories and slideshows as evening entertainment!), clearing out the last of the household items, sharing conversation and the view from the front porch, and walking through the house together room-by-room to share memories and celebrations of the life lived in that house. What a blessing to have Dad present and fully participating in this process! Plus, we’re happy to report that after 3 months on the market, sale on the house closed just before Christmas – a perfect Christmas gift!

After this, we took a few days to leisurely return to Michigan, making a stop in Ankeny, IA (to visit Kayla’s dear high school friend Bridget), and camping along the Hennepin Canal Parkway in Northern Illinois (a 19th-century attempt at connecting Chicago with the Mississippi River).

After about 10 days back in Michigan (where Kayla managed to get involved with some garden harvesting / canning), we pointed east and took off again. Our destination was eastern Virginia, but we opted for a new route across Michigan to Port Huron (north of Detroit), across Ontario to Niagara Falls, then south through central Pennsylvania and the northern part of Shenandoah National Park.

We arrived at Matthew’s parents’ house in Mathews County on Sept 22 and spent a couple of nights there before heading into Richmond. We had secured a sweet housesitting gig in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond for three weeks, which gave us proximity and time with Matthew’s parents, who live about an hour east of Richmond. Church Hill is full of fun little restaurants and bars, and is great for long walks with a good dog. We loved having niece Hannah visit for a few days; we also went to a couple of live music shows (Neko Case and Pokey Lafarge) and spent time with friends who live in the area as well as with Matthew’s family. Everything was fantastic, except for the adventurous chickens who kept escaping their coop!

October

We wrapped up our time in Virginia on October 17 and made our way back to Michigan. Although we would have loved to return at a more leisurely pace, we were feeling some urgency around house construction projects back in Glenn, plus we already had our next round of travel planned for October 29. We had read a little about Blackwater Falls State Park in eastern West Virginia, which is about 5.5 hours from Matthew’s parents’ place, so we made that our first stop. Unfortunately, the state park campground was full but we managed to get a spot at a sweet little private campground called Rest Rite just outside of Davis WV. This whole area is pretty intriguing – hiking, biking, fun small town action – so we’ve added this to our “must-return” list. On 10/18 we wound our way through the WV mountains and just kept going all the way across Ohio. The weather forecast called for really soggy conditions that night, and we were pretty tired, so we drove all the way to Adrian, MI before we stopped and grabbed a hotel room.

Back in Iris’ orbit (but without running water or electricity out at the lake), we moved into the guest room at her house near Grand Rapids. On October 29, Matthew flew to Alaska for two weeks of meetings and Kayla flew to Minneapolis for another 10 days in the midwest, including back to Storm Lake to celebrate Dad’s 94th birthday on Halloween.

November

After a few days in Storm Lake with her dad and sisters, Kayla spent a week in / around Des Moines – first with dear friend Bridget, and then on her own retreat in downtown Des Moines – while Matthew, with unfortunate hair (see below) talked education and visited friends in AK.

Coming back together in Michigan in mid-November, we took a quick spin to see Jeff Daniels perform an acoustic music show in Owosso, we had a fun Thanksgiving with Iris and her good friend David, and we spent a weekend in Traverse City with our pals Ed and David.

December

And that brings us to December, which has kept us solidly in West Michigan, and for the last 10 days we’ve been living back at the lake full-time, chipping away at house projects and personal goals (like catching up on our blog!), with a brief detour back to Grand Rapids to join Iris for a lovely Christmas Eve of carols and good food. Somehow we need to pull ourselves out from beneath these blankets and figure out what to bring back to Alaska and how to get it there, but for now it’s nice to watch the storm squalls cross over the lake and testify that this house is now certainly more than a summer cottage.

And then what?

Yes, we will be establishing our residence back in Sitka, but we aren’t done road-tripping. While things are up-in-the-air with Matthew’s job through 2026, we hope to sneak back to the Lower 48 for a few months to do a Northeast America road trip – there are still a few places on our map that need more lines! We’ve also got a summer solstice music festival planned in VA, maybe a Philly’s game in Philly … who knows what other fun and adventure is in store?! Maybe we can plan some shenanigans with you!

July 10-16

Yes, we’re still catching up on stories from four months ago. Good grief. But it’s fun to go back and revisit these fun memories!

Our draw to Lillehammer is Kayla’s college roommate, Emily, who moved there around 2010 when her husband Erik landed a job and they could launch an ex-pat life in beautiful Norway. It was truly delightful to spend 6 days with Emily and get better acquainted with their whole family (including their fun and brilliant children, Greta and Henrik, and gorgeous doggo, Lotta).

And just like that it was time to head back to Michigan! In Reykjavik we remembered we had a bunch of Euros, and wound up spending it all on some questionable candy. They are wild about the licorice in Iceland, and even go so far as to put it in their chocolate. Hmmm. If you ever want to try it, I’m sure we’ll still have some hidden in a cupboard somewhere.

Getting back to Glenn, Matthew jumped back into housing projects, Kayla jumped back in to On-Ramps, and we enjoyed about three weeks of relatively routine midwest summer days.

Coming up in our next post: Matthew gets a phone call, Kristina comes for a visit, and we head to Storm Lake via Minneapolis on a short but action-filled road trip!

July 6-10

In case you missed the last chapter, our heroes just finished a week in northern Germany and traveled by train to Berlin. What a city! We had four days jam-packed with history, culture, art, delicious food, and delightful conversation. We were so happy that niece Sophia could join us – ’twas such fun to explore and learn things with her!

We asked our friend Roald to pick some favorite parts of the city to visit. He describes Berlin not so much as a particular place, but as an overall experience. Well put. Everywhere there are beautiful parks, plus crazy good (and inexpensive) restaurants with tables on the sidewalk to watch the steady stream of people all going somewhere. There is art and architecture and delicious pastries and quiet places and lovely walks.

We had a fine hotel near Alexanderplatz very near train and bus stations, so getting around the city was pretty slick. Here’s a glance at the ground we covered: the blue line is a bike tour route we took; all the black circles with white stars show places we visited.

A great way to see the city and learn a lot in a short amount of time is to take a bike tour. In 3.5 hours we biked close to 20 km (12.4 miles) and saw fifteen or more notable Berlin sites: Museum Island, Konzerthaus Berlin, Checkpoint Charlie, Holocaust Memorial, Brandenburg Gate, Tiergarten & Victory Column, Reichstag, and Berlin Wall Memorial, plus more! Our guide was terrific – super informative and prepared with maps and photos.

We invested two afternoons into some heavy museum visits: the Stasi Museum and the Jewish Museum. The Stasi Museum is located in the former headquarters of the Ministry for State Security (MfS) of East Germany from 1960-1989. Since 1990 and the reunification of Germany, the Stasi Museum has been used to inform visitors about the Stasi and its activities as a “protection and security organ” during the SED dictatorship. It was chilling to see the ways Erich Mielke (MfS) manipulated surveillance systems to support Head of State Erich Honecker as leader and primary decider across all aspects of East Germany: head of party and state, secretariat of the Central Committee and Politburo (where all political, economic, and other basic decisions were made), Chairman of the State Council and National Defense Council. We also saw the propaganda that was fed to the people in an attempt to build loyalty for the state and suppress any concerns that the SED had stolen their freedoms and right to choose their leaders. No one knew who might be working for the Stasi (one of the largest secret police agencies in the world): at it’s largest, it employed 91,000 people. Spouses, family members, best friends — no one knew who they could trust anymore, and we saw examples of the information collected by Stasi on their friends and neighbors. It was grim, I tell ya.

The Jewish Museum is also incredible. Tracing the Jewish people all the way back to BC and how the diaspora spread around the world after encountering persecution after persecution, through the ~15 years of the Weimar Republic where Jews enjoyed a short stint of cultural flourishing before the Nazis took all that away, and of course the exhibitions about the 1930s-1940s were horrific. While not detailing the Holocaust specifically, the museum does an incredible job of showcasing the increasing discriminations and deportations that led up to trains filled with people shipped to concentration camps. How could this happen? How can this hatred and dehumanization still be happening today? Very, very disturbing perspective on humanity.

*whew* After both of these museum experiences we had to find beers and sunshine. We also enjoyed lots of other delicious food and drink across the City!

An icon of Berlin is the Ampelmännchen (“little traffic light man”) in all the crosswalk signs. East and West Berlin had different traffic signals – Amelmann came from the East and stuck around.

We’ll wrap up this post with a few more sights from Berlin. Next post – our last stop in Europe: Lillehammer Norway!

(this entry will cover the end of June to the beginning of July)

Hello hello! We’re still here! Wow, the last six weeks have been pretty wild. Last weekend we realized we hadn’t been in the same state for two consecutive Sundays since Aug 17! In order: Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Virginia. We’re rewinding the clock more than two months for today’s post, but before we dive into that, here are a few headlines of our shenanigans since returning from Europe in late July:

+ Kayla and her sisters had a few days in Chicago to see niece Kristina in an opera performance
+ Then Kristina came to Michigan for a week
+ LOTS of projects at the lake house in Glenn, MI
+ Matthew landed a new part-time job in Alaska government, which took him to Anchorage for 48 hours
+ Several days in Minneapolis visiting family & friends
+ Eight days in Iowa with Kayla’s whole family, cleaning out the rest of Dad’s house and celebrating his years there (fortunately, with Dad participating!)
+ High school football game with friends (the highlight being their daughter as cheerleader / marching band)
+ Making garden preserves with Iris
+ Road trip from West Michigan across Ontario to Niagara Falls, then south to Virginia
+ Settling into a 3-week housesitting gig in Richmond, VA, which also gives us time with the Turner family
+ Weekend with niece Hannah in Richmond

Stories on all that coming later! But for now, let’s time travel back to late June, starting with the amazing week we spent in Northern Germany — in Hamburg and the Boettcher family homeland in the Altes Land.

Brief Boettcher History

For context: what makes this all so special is that somehow the Boettcher family has managed to maintain ties to relatives in Germany, dating all the way back to the late-1800s during the Prussian war when Kayla’s great-grandfather Ernst immigrated to the US with four of his six brothers. His eldest brother, Johann, stayed behind to continue farming, and Ernst’s youngest brother Heinrich was still too young to leave home. Eventually, though, after their mother died, Heinrich also came to the US along with their father, who is now buried in Zion Lutheran cemetery less than a mile from where Kayla’s dad was born in northwest Iowa.

For over a century and across 4 generations, the descendants of these brothers found ways to keep in touch, and today Kayla’s family has strong ties to Eike, who is Kayla’s 3rd cousin, the great-granddaughter of eldest brother Johann. Eike and her children (Tjerk and Insa) have all visited their US relatives (including an epic week where Eike and Insa came to visit us in Sitka!), and Kayla has been to Germany twice before. It definitely helps that Eike and her family are completely delightful and great fun to spend time with. So as we planned our trip to Europe, it was pretty obvious that we needed to go visit them.

June 27 – 30: Hamburg

We started by flying from Edinburgh to Hamburg, where we were greeted by cousin Tjerk. He and his family instantly welcomed us into their home in the city, and we spent a few days exploring the sites.

July 1-5: Altes Land

On July 1, Kayla’s niece Sophia flew to Hamburg from Minneapolis to join us for the next 10 days in Germany. Eike came in from her village to pick us up at Tjerk’s, we all went to the airport to grab Sophia, and then we pointed toward the Altes Land with a quick visit at Ballinstadt Emigration Museum.

“Altes Land” translates as “old country” but the original term was “Olland,” referring to the Holland origins of the land: initially, Dutch settlers reclaimed the land from the sea with a complex system of dykes, resulting in rich lowlands perfect for agriculture. Eike and Insa live near each other in the village of Moorende, on the banks of the Este River just north of Buxtehude.

Matthew, Kayla, and Sophia shared a lovely apartment just down the road. Eike and her neighbor loaned us some bikes, and we spent most of these four days bicycling between Moorende and Buxtehude, enjoying time with Eike and Insa and all the beauty of Lower Saxony. We also had the treat of a professional tour guide, as Eike works part-time for the local tourism board, so we had official tours of Buxtehude and the stretch of Altes Land between there and Stade.

But the most special of all experiences was a quick tour of Boettcher homelands and a “cousins lunch,” where we had the chance to meet Eike’s sister and several next generation cousins from their branch of the family.

This was truly a lovely few days, and it was over too soon. We’re so grateful to Eike, Insa, and Tjerk for hosting us, and for all the laughter, music, delightful conversation, and delicious food we shared. Hopefully we can find a way to be together again soon!

Coming Up Next…

Kayla, Matthew, and Sophia head to Berlin!

Editor’s Note: Did our last post show up in your inbox truncated or with messy text? There were a lot of photos … we might have blown up the internet. You can always (re)read our posts direct on our website: jetsetbetties.com

June 17-27 – we visited five Scottish islands (Mull, Staff, Iona, Islay, and Arran) plus one sweet river town (Peebles). Come along with us to relive the fun!

MULL, STAFFA, IONA
While we were in Oban, we took a 10-hour, 3-island day trip via boat and bus. Highlights were visiting Fingal’s Cave on Staffa (inspiration for Mendelssohn’s “The Hebrides” overture) and the Iona Monastery.

ISLAY
Our favorite island of the five we visited was Islay, where we had a charming beach house, perfect weather, and plenty of peaty whisky!

ARRAN
After a thoroughly delightful 11 days together, we parted ways with Tom and Sarah after Islay and hopped another ferry to Arran.

PEEBLES
When we told people we were going to Peebles, most of them said “WHY??” We had a hunch, and we were right – it’s a charming little town along the River Tweed, about 25 miles south of Edinburgh.

COMING UP NEXT:
Stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll take to to Germany!

We are excited to share tales of our European adventures! It’s impossible to believe it’s already been 2 months since we embarked on this journey, and also pretty wild that we’ve already been back in Michigan for three weeks. How do the days disappear so quickly!?

We had SUCH a wonderful time for the entirety of our trip, but especially in Scotland. We loved Scotland so much, in fact, that we’re going to split those stories into two posts. Today we’ll cover June 10-18, our time in Edinburgh, Pitlochry, and part of Oban.

Edinburgh

After a couple of long flights and being too tired to read local maps well (we took a couple of wrong turns while trying to find our apartment), we finally stumbled into our dear friends Tom and Sarah, just as they were coming out of our place! Thank goodness, because they had rested up enough to help us haul our bags and instruments up the 5 flights of stairs! We dropped our stuff, took much-needed showers, and then immediately went out for a fun and delicious evening.

But a true highlight of Edinburgh was the music tour we took. We hired a guide (“an actual Edinburgh musician!”) to take us to three music bars and tell us about the local music scene. In the tour description he mentioned that there could be opportunities for us to join the jams, so we brought our instruments along. And whaddya know, we played in two Edinburgh pubs!

PITLOCHRY

On June 13 we said goodbye to Edinburgh, and hopped in the car that Tom & Sarah rented (and Tom generously offered to drive!). Tom rewired his brain pretty quickly to drive on the left and we headed north. We stopped in Aberdour for a nice cafe lunch and walkabout the city, then on to Pitlochry, a beautiful little river town about 70 miles north of Edinburgh.

Within hours of arriving in Pitlochry, we were exploring the town and putting together a little garden picnic for later. As we were looking for a bottle of wine (or maybe whisky?) we were chatting with the shopkeeper at Robertson’s and revealed that we’re musicians. She practically begged us to come and play in the shop that evening — they were hosting an open house / tasting event and she hadn’t booked any music. We accepted! She paid us with a bottle of wine, and we played for an hour or so, mostly to an empty room (except for the shopkeeper who was VERY appreciative and enjoyed the music). It wasn’t until the last 10 minutes that people started to come in, but unfortunately we had to move on to get dinner before all the restaurants closed. (Note to future Scotland travelers: most restaurants close up by 9:00. Even in Edinburgh!)

The next couple of days were fairly rainy, and we were happy to take a slower pace. Matthew and I went on a nice long hike one day, and we found a couple other gems in the town. Very sweet!

TO OBAN, VIA KINGUSSIE

Our next stop was Oban, but we decided to take a meandering route to see a little of the highlands. Beautiful! We drove as far north as Kingussie, where we found a farmer’s market in action, a wonderful cheese shop, a very odd antiques/oddities store, and a scrummy lunch. All day we were on the quest for “hairy coos” (long-haired Shetland cows); lo-and-behold, there they were, near the Ruthven Barracks!

After saying goodbye to the hairy coos, we continued on to Oban, a nice seaside town. We rented a house less than a mile from downtown and enjoyed a couple of days exploring the area: Dunollie Castle, Fingal’s Dogstone, and McCaig Tower to name a few, plus Oban distillery of course! We also took a day trip to three neighboring islands, but I’m going to save that story for the next post.

OK, there’s some pictures and words to tide you over until our next post, wherein our heroes travel by sea, auto, and bus to some far off islands and to many more adventures.

Hello dear friends. We jumped right from our trip to Europe and back into our lives in Glenn, Michigan. Matthew is deep in some home improvement work for Iris’ house here, and Kayla is back into the daily grind of her job at On-Ramps. We have great intention to start posting some stories of our time abroad, but in the meantime…

Remember our trip through Kentucky back in April, and our meet-up with the Bluegrass Chapter of the Tearjerkers? Remember how we (and quite a few other folks) were gushing because “The Guy from Camp and Camera” was there? As he does, Mike interviewed folks around the campground about their trailers, and we were part of that. He wasn’t sure if the sound was OK when he toured our camper, and we didn’t see a video on his channel in the weeks following the gathering, so we assumed it didn’t make the cut.

We were wrong! Here’s the video! (We highly recommend watching the whole video – you’ll get a feel for these Tearjerker gatherings and tour one other camper. But if you don’t have time for the full video, our part starts at 14:59.)

Hello dear friends! We are back from our travels and firmly planted in Glenn MI for the next month or so. It will take us a bit to compile a full tale of our travels, so here’s a quick note to let you know that, yes, it was a fabulous trip, wherein we:

Spent 17 days traveling about in beautiful Scotland:

Spent 13 days in Germany exploring Hamburg, Estebrugge, and Berlin:

Spent 6 days in Norway in Lillehammer:

And wrapped it up with 3 days in Wyandotte, Michigan helping our friends sort through a few things:

More to come!

Hello friends! It is a blustery day here on Lake Michigan as I type. The past months have been full, so much so that each week we procrastinate the blog seems to add ever more to the burden of getting one writ. But they say the best way to get going is to start, so here we are.

In a couple weeks we head to Scotland (and Germany! and Norway!) for five weeks! We are joining dear friends Sarah and Tom for two weeks of Inn-to-Inn traveling in Scotland. Next we’ll head to Hamburg to check in on some German Boettchers, with dear niece Sophia joining us for some of that ride. We’ll close out with a trip to Lillehammer to visit some American friends who’ve tucked themselves up there for many years now. Whew!

But first we better do a little catching up on what’s been happening since our last post. Let’s see…

In March we took a quick trip to Chicago to celebrate Kayla’s birthday.

Then we headed down to Storm Lake with the Table Ease trailer to haul stuff, sell stuff, and give stuff away as the Boettcher Family prepares to sell Lloyd’s house.

In April we meandered our way back to Virginia (with the BettieMobile!) to help Matthew’s parents out with some projects there. This included getting the Turners’ boat trailer (which had been parked in a field for 10+ years) back into rolling condition.

From Coastal Virginia we drove to Kentucky to catch up with the Bluegrass Chapter of the TearJerkers at Big Bone Lick State Park. TearJerkers is a national “organization” (loosely defined!) for folks with teardrop campers. There are chapters across the US, and the active ones meet once a month somewhere in their area. They also have an online forum that mostly talks about meet-ups, but also serves as a place to ask questions and share advice on building campers, which Matthew took advantage of several times during our build. We’ve been talking about getting to one of these gatherings for two years now, and we finally found one that fit our route!

Another resource Matthew discovered while he was building our camper is a YouTube channel called Camp & Camera, where a guy goes around interviewing DIY camper builders and asking them about their special features and what they’d do differently. Matthew learned a lot from those interviews, and guess what!? That guy was at this gathering in KY and interviewed Matthew! He really liked Matthew’s custom-made awnings and curtain design. Unfortunately, the audio didn’t record very well, so that interview didn’t make it to the YouTube channel.

And that gets us to May! We’ve spent the whole month in Michigan, enjoying some on-again/off-again spring weather while working on more building projects.

We also took two trips to northern Michigan – one to Traverse City and Leelanau, where we had a lovely combo of friends, family, and community theater; and a camping trip to Grand Marais, MI in the U.P.

Thanks as always for tuning in! Check back again in a couple of months for stories of our European escapades.

Hi Friends! So sorry it’s been so long. The alternative title for this post was Hi-brrrrrrr-nation. Get it?? Cuz we’ve kinda gone into hibernation, and the whole country was really cold for awhile???! Hahahahaaa (btw, this is Kayla, in case you didn’t guess that from this punchy goofy opening … but we’re sharing the writing below)

It all starts way back in mid-December, when we were in Michigan, packing to leave for five months (one in Bend, Oregon and four in Juneau for the Legislative Session). Even as we piled our suitcases in the back of Iris’ car to go to the airport, we were getting indications that maybe we were heading in the wrong direction. Kayla’s work folks were ready to let her go full time for several months, Matthew had yet to land a firm position for the session, and there were some needs and opportunities in the Lower 48 that were brewing. Kayla couldn’t work full time for an eastern time zone organization from Alaska (not without getting up at 4 am). The deciding factor was when we realized that we might have just one more year planned away from Sitka before returning to Alaska (for good?). While we were in Bend, we decided to buy a ticket back to Michigan instead of going on to Juneau.

That house sit in Bend was wonderful. We arrived mid-December and left a month later in mid-January. The folks that we were sitting for were taking a month being in (and getting to and from) Antarctica! We did a 2-week housesit for this couple back in March ’23, and received the best compliment we’ve ever gotten for pet sitting: “Our dogs were happy to see us, but clearly hadn’t missed us that much.” We were delighted to be invited back.

The kitchen at this place is amazing, so we really leaned in to cooking.

Now let’s take a look at those dogs. Here are Lizzie and Molly:

The trick is to get them thoroughly exhausted. Since they are in pretty good shape, that requires some steep climbs and acrobatics. (And, yes, they always chase the same stick.)

We also had the treat of spending time with our friend Natalie and her family. Kayla and Natalie met in Sitka and became fast friends – even though Natalie moved away from Sitka just a couple years later, this is a sweet, lasting friendship.

One afternoon we took Natalie’s daughters out with us and the dogs. Some folks were chatting with us about how great the dogs were, and we said, “Those aren’t our dogs!” [a curious look from the chatterers]. Then we said, “Come to think of it, these aren’t our kids, either!”

Just as our month in Bend was ending, we had a chance to participate in a wonderful open mic night at a downtown coffeehouse. Everyone was blown away by the harmonies.

One last sunset in Bend and a goodbye to the fabulous house…

And then it was off to Portland! Since we weren’t in a rush to get to AK anymore, we just had to have a visit with our dear friends Poppy and Bill.

Finally our heroes return to Glenn, MI to settle in for the remainder of winter.

In mid-Feb, we took an excursion – first to Detroit to visit Ed and David, and then a quick visit to Matthew’s folks in Virginia, where we grabbed the Table Ease trailer to do some hauling in the midwest.

In Detroit (Eddie is a native) we stepped inside some incredible 1920s architecture, including the stunning Fisher Building:

We had lunch at a great place called the Green Dot, which I guess used to be in the area of the city where one stabled their horses. We managed to find some parking.

Next stop was Michigan Central Station. For decades, this building symbolized the decay and neglect of a once great city. Now it symbolizes a great rebirth. It had only recently re-opened to the public after it’s grand renovation. Even on a blustery winter day it was drawing crowds. You could really feel the joy in the air.

Here’s a few other highlights from Detroit. Third Man Records is a place that actually presses (and sells) vinyl records. It was founded by Detroit native rocker Jack White. (Photo credits for several of these plus the nice one of us at the top of the post are shared with David and Ed … but especially David. That guy sure takes some beautiful photos!)

From Detroit we headed to Cobbs Creek Virginia to check in on Matthew’s folks, and to check out the venerable Table Ease trailer, which is heading back to Iowa to do some hauling. (If you’re unfamiliar with the Table Ease story, ask Kayla sometime about the patent her dad owns.) We had an icy week (in the 20’s!) there, and then got ourselves back to Glenn Michigan, which will be our base camp for the remainder of the year (give or take).

So, these days Kayla wakes up and works an honest full-time job (not forever, just these few months). Matthew is working too, doing renovations on the Glenn cottage. We have a big Europe trip coming up in June, additional trips to see family here and there, and a few other surprises in store. In a couple of hours, we are heading to Chicago for the weekend to celebrate Kayla’s birthday week!

If you’ve made it to the end of this giant post, thank you for sticking with us. Until next time!