We had a pretty chill July, all things considered. I mean, the weather was hot. But it doesn’t feel like the regular overwhelming get-everything-done-because-the-nice-weather-only-lasts-so-long pressure!

We both feel like we haven’t been using the bus enough, so early in July we took her for a spin!

We drove out to a local park with beautiful views. I brought the drone along but the bird’s eye view wasn’t spectacularly better than the view from the ground. Still a very idyllic scene of the rolling countryside!

There are two covered bridges in the area, and one of them allows vehicle traffic. I couldn’t remember which was which, but since we were close we stopped by. It was not the one we could drive through. Oh well!

We wandered through the bridge, as it was still a very pretty scene.

The river underneath the bridge was extremely turbulent, with waves crashing up on shore. We couldn’t figure out what was going on until we wandered further and realized we were just downstream from a dam. This was right after we got some extreme rain which led to major flooding in the Detroit area. The rivers in our area were all very high, so this dam was working overtime to process all the water!

My brother and sister-in-law wanted to pick some cherries, and they invited us along! We picked more cherries than I thought I wanted, but we went through them so fast that I wished I’d picked more!

Then about a week later, we went out and picked a ton of blueberries. This is peak summer for me – I love blueberries! I made blueberry muffins, blueberry cheesecake bars, blueberry crisp, and blueberry coffee cake!

I feel like my camera hasn’t been autofocusing very well (maybe 3+ years of living in a salty humid boat environment hasn’t been great for the electronics?!) so I did a little testing at the blueberry farm. Turns out it’s just my UV filter getting hazy, yay! A cheap fix!

Kyle got a new (used) bike in June, and then it sat for a minute while he sorted out new tires for it. In July he started enjoying some awesome bike rides! He’d come home with photos like this, which really show how excited he is about his new bike.

We found a house that we LOVED and were ready to be really aggressive with our offer. Kyle saw the listing minutes after it was posted online and we made immediate plans to go see it the following day. The next morning, we were looking through photos one last time and falling more in love with it, and that’s when we got a call from our realtor: the owners had already received and accepted an offer and needed to cancel the showing. WHAT? This market is so crazy right now! It is extremely disheartening to be hunting for a house.

Even if we don’t drive the bus as much as we’d like, we’ve been setting up the awning in our backyard and enjoying our own little oasis! It’s a great spot to hang out with cold drinks and good friends!

So that was pretty much our month. It doesn’t feel like it was too busy, we’re just enjoying a nice slow summer!