1BR Safari

It has been a very long time since I went apartment hunting.

The last time I did that was in 1993 when I moved to Iowa. I was living in Pittsburgh at the time and planning to start my PhD program so that April I flew out to Cedar Rapids, rented a car, and drove down to a motel in Iowa City where I stayed for a few days and saw as many apartments as I could fit into my schedule. On the plus side, I ended up with a very nice apartment with good neighbors and a kind landlord and I lived there for the entire time I was in Iowa City. On the down side, I got into a minor fender bender with the rental car in the motel parking lot and when I turned on the news later that night a good chunk of Waco TX had burned down. So it was kind of a mixed bag as far as the experience went.

Oliver is going to graduate school in the fall for his MA and since he has no experience in apartment hunting and Kim was tied down with various work commitments this week it fell to me to go with him as the Experienced Hand in this matter, experience being a relative thing. He and Kim had gone out a few weeks ago to attend a conference there and meet the folks in his new department and they’d had a lovely time of it, so it seemed fair that it would be my turn to visit the place anyway.

We drove out yesterday, checked into the hotel, and scouted out a couple of places that he’d found on Zillow or other similar things that didn’t exist the last time I had to do this. It’s a brave new world out there. We found them pretty easily and checked out the neighborhoods, which all seemed fine, before deciding that it was dinner time. After a rigorous process of figuring out what was a) enticing and b) within walking distance of the hotel we settled on a lovely little ramen place and it was only after we’d sat down at the table that Oliver realized this was the exact place he’d gone with Kim the last time he was there despite them staying at a different and much more distant hotel. Same table, in fact. Good food, though – you have to give them that. We also walked around the downtown for a bit. It's a bit ragged around the edges but lively and interesting, and that's not a bad thing for a downtown.

Today we looked at the insides of the apartments.

There are a lot of very small apartments in that town, all of which are on the second floor and only accessible by staircases barely wider than I am which will make moving furniture an interesting proposition in much the same way that three-headed frogs are … interesting. We will tell those tales for a long time, though, no doubt.

We had some time between viewings and as the day wore on we occupied ourselves with lunch (not the ramen place again, though we did briefly consider it), a visit to the world’s least organized used book store, quick stop into a Middle Eastern grocery, a scouting expedition to a supermarket to see what they had, and a tour of the campus in search of visitor parking which we eventually found enough of to take a quick look at the student union, the library, and Oliver’s department. I bought a mug at the bookstore in the student union for my collection because it seemed appropriate. I have mugs for every college Lauren and Oliver have attended now.

Eventually Oliver settled on an apartment – the last one we looked at, which was a very nice little studio in a bright purple house – and then we headed home.

It’s starting to get more real for all of us now.

In a couple of months Oliver will be off to the next phase of his life, and with Lauren pursuing her own graduate degree this means that Kim and I will be empty nesters for real. We’ve had a couple of trial runs at that, and I have to say I was always glad to have them back for however long they stayed with us. A family fills a home with noise and activity, and there’s a space left open when that goes away. But that is the order of things. They're supposed to do that.

There will be visits and stories, though, and those will be good.