Top 5 Things We Will Miss About Living in Cary, North Carolina
1. Family less than a mile away. My sister Katrina and her family moved to Cary the same time that we did. Luckily we were able to find a house to rent less than a mile away from the house they bought. It was really nice to have family to hang out with and to call on for help. I especially liked having a niece that could babysit.
2. Sunday dinners. It was fun getting together each week with the Gaspar de Albas and Cranes for Sunday dinner. The 13 kids made for some crazy times, but the memories with their cousins I am sure will last a lifetime.
3. Cary Greenways and Parks. Cary has 30 miles of beautiful tree lined greenways and trails connecting parks to the houses. The house we rented was across the street from one of the greenways and Katrina's house backed up to the same one. It was fun to go on family walks, bike rides, and occasional runs on the Cary greenways.
4. Fall Colors. Cary had nice big trees that changed beautiful colors in the fall. It made for fun times when the leaves fell and the kids jumped in the big piles. Luckily the city provided a service where they came by twice in the fall to suck up all the leaves that had been raked to the street.
5. Convenient school time. The second year we were in Cary the kids were rezoned to a year round school that started at 9:15. I am not a morning person so the school start time was perfect for me. It was even better because they rode the bus and the bus stop was 50 feet from our front door. The schedule for the year round school was 9 weeks at school and then 3 weeks off. Just when the kids were starting to get tired of school they got a break. And when I was starting to get tired of the break, it was back to school.
Top 5 Things We Will Not Miss
1. Critters. There were many critters that enjoyed living in our house with us. I was not very fond of them. The first ones to welcome us were the roaches. I guess we should have clued in when moving in we saw several roach motels scattered throughout the house. The roaches were huge. There were some that would somehow fly across our living room. We dedicated our fly swatter as a roach swatter instead. The mosquitos were really bad. They seemed to attack Julia and I the most. We must have sweet blood. A really odd critter that would join us in the evening in the summer was a slug. Every night after putting the kids to bed, we would come in the living room to find a slug that would appear on a wall next to our fireplace. We don't think it was always the same one because the sizes would change, but there was one there every night. Really weird. The last uninvited critters were the mice. Luckily this was only an issue our last few months. These really grossed me out. We experimented with several methods of getting rid of them.
2. A cold drafty house. The house was very drafty even though it was less than 20 years old. The downstairs was very cold in the winter.
3. Uncourteous drivers. Early on I noticed that the drivers would not give the right away to pedestrians.
Anytime I was at a store and was crossing to get in the store, people would not stop. I even found out that they tended to speed up. Even when standing with my children they were not very considerate.
4. Grocery Stores. We missed our HEB. It was so much more expensive in Cary and they didn't have good selections. The craziest thing was that if you went to the grocery store after 8 p.m. it was a ghost town. HEB in San Antonio is hopping at all hours of the night.
5. Phonebooks. We received an excessive amount of phonebooks on our doorstep. They seemed to drop them off every season and not just one. They would often leave two or three at a time.
