From the travel journey - Day 6

Madison's entry:

We have now arrived at our base in Evansville and the trip has certainly been an interesting experiences so far; with our time at the farm and with Aunt Lorene.  We stayed with Aunt Lorene on Saturday and Sunday.  (She claims she never got to finish this entry....but based on her other entries I'm not so sure...)

Cara's entry:

Elshoff Forest Retreat

 

The house in Evansville is awesome.  It is over 4,000 square feet and three floors.  The basement has a complete kitchen, bedroom, living room, full bath, study, and an entertainment room complete with pool table.  There is also a back deck leading out to the lake.

Major Pool Game

 

 View from the downstairs porch

The main floor is where we hang out and the third floor is where we sleep and bathe.  The main floor has a complete kitchen, living room, dining room, family room, bathroom, and a laundry room that is as big as most of the rooms in my house in Florida.

 View looking into laundry room

View as you turn the corner by the broom

The third floor has four bedrooms, but only two of them are equipped with beds.  We tried out the beds just as Goldilocks did when she rented the three bears house.  We found that the guest room with its matching purple and green Laura Ashley prints on the bed, side table, curtains, etc. was as hard as the fake beds one finds in the department stores.  The master bedroom, decorated in a deep blue, was a sleep number bed with his and her controls.  On top of the sleep number was a mattress topper and on top of that was a foam topper.  Kelly and Darcy decided to remove the two toppers and put that on top of the mattress in the guest bed.  They took that bedroom for the night and Madison and I took the master bedroom.

 Guest bedroom

Master bedroom
 

Every room in the house has some type of storage area.  I have never seen a house with more storage space.  Some of the rooms have built in storage units.  Every room has a closet of some sort, many of them with multiple closets.  In each room is also an intercom, with the main intercom unit in the family area/kitchen on the main floor.  The intercoms are even on the porches outside and probably the garage, although I haven't checked that yet.

 Study storage

 Two closets in hallway in basement

Linen closet in upstairs hallway

There are also windows and or doors in every room and some closets making it not the safest place, although as Madison pointed out we have an easy escape as long as the intruder enters a different room then the one we are in.  It reminds me a lot of the the house we rented in Michigan a few years back, but for some reason I'm not concerned like I was there. The analysis I came up with for this was perhaps one of the following three reasons:

• Kelly's disposition is one of calm, authority, and security certainty, whereas Susan was as much of a nervous nelly as I was.

• I have more faith in Kelly's ability to fight off intruders and save my kids and me then I did in Susan's.

• This house is in a city that I know like the back of my hand which gives me more confidence.

I did not sleep as well that night as I had the other nights of this vacation, but that was due to the bed and not worry. I was exhausted after our overeating at G.D. Ritzy's, driving, and grocery shopping and so I allowed Darcy and Kelly to adjust the sleep number on my side of the bed. I woke up around three AM to find the number had deflated from the twenties to zero and I could feel the bed springs in my back. I fumbled for the control and pumped up the bed to the thirties. By five AM I gave up as the bed kept deflating. I wandered downstairs with my pillow and a sheet and slept quite well on one of the two plaid couches in the family room.

About an hour later Kelly, who had slept just as miserably on her bed, wandered downstairs to sleep on the couch. Finding me on it she crept back up to the bed I had vacated and slept quite well, although Madison was a tad disturbed to wake up in the master bed to find I had gone blonde in the night.

Darcy's entry:

The next day we left Aunt Lorene's and drove to Evansville.  We ate "linner" (a meal between lunch and dinner) at G.D. Ritzy's!  It was SO DELIGHTFUL!  Then we went to Kelly's dad's forest house and unpacked.  the house was two stories and a basement.  There were doors and storage rooms everywhere.  We had a lot of fun playing pool there that night and trying to make the intercoms work.  Eventually we got them to work.  The rest of the time we played with the intercoms and pretended we were staff at the EFR.

 One of the many systems in each room

 The main intercom unit