With our furniture in storage, we spent several weeks in the fall of 1984 traveling throughout Washington and British Columbia while living intermittently in a motel in Bellingham, a very small motel. The time of transition is the hardest part of relocation. We were uncomfortable feeling unsettled but we had promised each other to postpone any decision to buy a house until we had lived in the area for a year or so. Bellingham had many beautiful old homes for sale at prices that, after California, seemed unbelievably low. But we held out. A nice rental place was harder to find but by December we’d found one and by Christmas we were settled in a house on Alabama Hill, overlooking Bellingham Bay.