Day 2: Kentucky to Missouri

Today was pretty uneventful. Hit some heavy traffic in St. Louis but now we are safe in our hotel in Columbia. Driving through Kentucky this morning was wonderful - every where you look there are elaborate horse farms which I love to gawk at.

Grover continues to do well. He sleeps a lot which is nice. When he's not sleeping he's busy looking for cows. Anytime we pass an open grassy field - which is quite often - he perks up and does whatever he can to see the cows/horses/sheep/oil rigs. Even if the field is empty, he strains his neck to make sure he's not missing anything good.

Ryan says we are good travel buddies. :) We'll be hitting the road early again tomorrow to make it to Kansas and then finish the trip on Saturday. We're hoping to be at our apartment by early afternoon.

Day 1: North Carolina to Kentucky

We literally did not see the sun today - it rained almost the whole way here and was cloudy when the rain did let up. However, we were in pretty good spirits and Grover was exceptionally well behaved.

We drove through Virginia and West Virginia and then of course part of Kentucky. WV, as expected, was interesting...

Pictures to come when I'm on a real computer.

Also, my car (which we are towing behind the moving van) had a near death experience today. We had been driving for about two hours when Ryan looked in the mirrors and saw that the tire straps had completely fallen off of the tires. How long had it been like that - nobody knows. What we do know is that despite the car being essentially loose on top of the trailer, my car had not budged. This is nothing short of God's grace and certainly a tangible response to our prayers for safety. Hopefully tomorrow will be less exciting.

One more day...

Well this is it! The truck is loaded and we're sitting on the floor :). We have the air mattress set up for what we can only imagine will be the greatest sleep of our lives and then we're off at 7:30am.

This is the truck with all of our stuff...and of course that leaves the empty house.

We signed the paperwork today for selling the house and are taking a leap of faith that the closing will go smoothly without us tomorrow. On the way to the attorney's office we piloted our new sunglasses. Since we both wear glasses, we have to get *special* glasses. Ryan got some super cool clip ons and I got some extra fancy ones to fit OVER my glasses. People have tried to tell me they like them but I personally feel I look like Willy Wonka in the TV room. Judge for yourself.

Tonight, Levi and his family are providing our dinner since our kitchen is empty. We are also expecting friends to swing by to say their goodbyes so we'll be busy tonight with that.

Time to pack up the computer...won't be checking emails really until we are set up on CO. We are hoping to arrive on Saturday. We expect about 30 hours of driving time - the trailer for our car maxes at about 60mph so that should be a fun ride.

And of course, we have to mention Grover. He has been handling all of this surprisingly well. The house is empty and he's pretty relaxed - as you can see here, he is trying to relax on the extra moving blankets.

That's all for now! More to come from the Centennial State....

Two days to go...

We have been using the past two weeks to pack and take care of all the necessary phone calls/paperwork/etc to move across the country. In case you were wondering how Grover is doing in all of this, this picture sums up his stress so far.

 

There was a great surprise (well, surprise to me) going away party on Friday that was quickly dubbed the "See You Later" party because it was too sad to call it a going away party. It was great and it was yet again proof of how incredible our friends are here. 

We also said goodbye to our church yesterday. Thankfully, we'll be able to go back to visit when we make trips to Raleigh. Best church ever.

Today, we learned something new: don't use an affiliate rental company to rent a moving truck. We went to Barbour's Towing and Something to rent our Penske and it was quite an experience. We were there for almost an hour and a half while Mark, the quasi-motivated employee, "helped" us get our truck ready. Part of the car carrier was busted so we had to go to the official Penske dealer a few miles away to get it fixed. Once at the legit dealer, we quickly realized our hassle would have been eliminated had we driven a little farther initially to the dealer. BUT we got a free pad lock for our troubles :) We also initially reserved a 22ft truck but the boys at Barbour's didn't have one so we came away with a 26ft truck. 

Gigantic.

It's as long as our house.

Tonight we will be doing some preliminary loading of the heavy stuff and then we'll tackle the remainder tomorrow. Also, we were curious as to how Grover would respond to being in the truck.We think he'll be just fine.