We had built our house slowly, over 15 years. We had travelled each weekend from the monotonous concrete box jungle of California's Silicon Valley, to the peaceful foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was a lot of dedicated time & effort; but it had really brought Dawn and I closely together with a project that we both found fun. We realized early in our marriage that we were great together as a team. One thing is living and sleeping together, with a convenience store, super market and TV set life interspersed between working hours; another entirely is designing and building a project together for over a decade.
We had started our home from a pretty piece of bare land that Dawn found in the Northern Californian foothills. It was about 155 miles form our Silicon Valley town home's front door. We had designed and built our home slowly, the way we thought we wanted to live during retirement. Trees, Veggy patch, Orchard, Vineyard. Boy were we wrong.
Building our Home
After installing a well pump, Dawn is Installing the water tank system and squashing gophers along the way. Duck!
Our home project did actually end up as a tranquil country home in a pretty spot with lots of wildlife all around.
Dawn, making the driveway in the rain. She's thinking hard about how to stop this buggy again... where those brakes are? When Dawn was learning to drive the roller she ran Peter over. You can just make out the dent in the road where Peter's half squashed head got embedded into the gravel.
She has a thing about squashing things with rolling objects.
Our naughty visitors, pretty much every night. Or were they here first - making us the visitors? Very friendly, always very hungry and they all got on great with our cats. It's nice to watch animals sharing food: side by side.
Mr P, our country cat, standing guard in our little bamboo forrest path. We put 15 different types of bamboo into our little forrest which made a wonderful sound in the rain.
Planting up our mini Barberra vineyard. It was especially pretty in spring. It can produce 8 bottles of wine a day for Peter's Scottish liver.
California foothills sunset - on the Patio. Stunning.
Dawn programming her latest App - sitting on the patio with her MacBook and the Tijuana Tipu trees are flowering yellow. Our home was an ideal place to develop Apps. Good internet access and quiet.
Pride of Barbados plants around the house. Little water needed and very flamboyant. A great choice for thirsty California landscaping.
Dawn loved to can home grown fruit in her kitchen
Dawn's Lovely pair of Onions!
Shiro Plums. The first to arrive in the orchard each spring. Like Candy!
Bings - and the birds didn't take them!?!??! Weird birds... they don't know what they were missing!
California poppies at the entrance gate.
Peter pouring Concrete. I think we towed over a hundred little trips with our poor old land-rover to get concrete loads.
We were only 'just' able to grow bougainvilia in the side-yard, without being frost bitten.
While living from our new home we decided to learn two future skills
(i) Learn to Sail- and all about the systems on complex sail boats.
(ii) Learn to write iPhone Apps.
So we sailed and wrote... and sailed and wrote and sailed and wrote. Training!
During the finishing of our house we started short term traveling and sailing - training and chartering various sailboats. Vancouver Island, Greece, the Caribbean....
Peter had done a bunch of sailing when he was a kid in Scotland. But sailing, as a way of traveling is a never ending learning curve so we had to ramp up our skills.
Short term sailing travel trips were great fun of course, but they were never really driving or defining our lives.
We viewed these trips as simply training exercises.
We eventually sold our home to a super nice family who appreciated all the hundreds of trees we had planted and who we are sure will look after two of our two cats: Mr Paws and Camille.
It It certainly wasn't easy to find great home buyers that would offer our cats a good home.
And, we clearly couldn't split these two lovers up. Get a room!
Right before we left, we were running out of time. Dawn was going crazy, finalizing her latest evhotels.org App.
We wanted to use this App for the time when driving on the road. This App is designed to help Electric Car Drivers find hotels that offer over-night electric car charging for their guests. Or, to find hotels with electric car charging very close by.
"EVHotels", as we named them.
We hope Dawn's App will help lots of touring EV Drivers and make a little contribution to the planet. You can find it here to download for free if you drive an electric car and like to charge overnight at your hotel. We hope you enjoy.
Dawn also added a search filter to the evhotels app - so you can find the hotels in a chain that you might be a member of to build up those Frequent Flier Miles.
We enjoyed staying with a couple of specific hotel chains. So we added this feature to the app. It really worked well.
We planned to drive all over the US and Canada in search of Chloe while learning about Aluminum Boat building. Checking out the various boat builders, expert in the construction of Aluminum Sailboats. So our EVHotels App had to be solidly up n' running before we left!
Our third cat, Charlie would go to live with my Sister and her two sprogs in Scotland. A strange personality... and we loved him for it. A Super friendly fur. We wonder what he'll think of snow!
Before we left: we organized all our paperwork so that we can deal with it remotely, packed only 2 large roller luggage cases, phones & lap tops. Our electric car was packed and charged up full. We had also shipped some bits and bobs sailing stuff off to family in Europe: sailing clothes and boots and nav' equipment.
We're were ready to roll... Bye House, Bye Furs, Bye land!
... 'kinda tough....
Goodbye Mr Paws
Mr P would follow us every where we walked on our 20 acre property. Good Mr P.
Bye Camille. Be kind to each other.
Then we were off , on the road. Off to Find Chloe... our new sailing boat home.
Where would we sleep tonight... we wondered..
