The move

I realized that I never really blogged the move.  What a week!  The girls in the ward threw a very sweet little goodbye party for me and Grant's parents came to help--it was so nice for Kendra to have someone to play with in the nice, air conditioned back room while I finished packing.  Archie drove the truck the whole way from Chicago to State College!  And in that last stretch in these Pennsylvania hills, that's not nothing!

We had a lot of help on both ends with loading (which happened on the very hottest day of the summer when the high was over 100 degrees--awesome) and unloading our truck--though to our dismay once it was loaded to the brim we realized we'd forgotten the things in our storage unit!  By some miracle we were able to get a covered trailer for significantly less money than it would have been to replace the things in it the night before we left in the peak of moving season.  We only had to go to Englewood to pick it up.  For those of you less familiar with Englewood, it's the place Elvis was talking about in that one song where the hardened criminals live and do what hardened criminals do (we've heard some real humdinger horror stories set in this neighborhood).  But we were on a main road at 9 o'clock on a Friday morning, it was fine.  Nobody tried to rob us or break into our truck or anything--it was downright anticlimactic.

Alas we don't have any pictures.  We were busy doin' stuff because it turns out there is a whole lot to do when  you move out of state.  Like arguing with the landlord for our security deposit after I asked him what his expectations were 3 times before he came over and all he ever said was, "Just make sure it's clean" which I did.  He wanted to charge us $150 for a few normal wear and tear scuffs on the living and dining room walls and I threw a fit.  He came down to $100 but I was still mad.  He never said anything about painting the walls, tried adding charges to things we didn't do and told him about when we moved in, and tried to tell us that it will cost him that much to "hire someone" to touch up the walls.  Whatever, buddy.  Chances are the paint you need is in the laundry room and it will take someone 5 minutes to do it.  Hoser.

After that, I wasn't too sad to see the Chicago skyline disappear in the rear view mirror.


Kendra handled the trip pretty well.  Actually, once we got on the road, pretty much everything was a total breeeeeze.  Well, aside a roadside stand with some false advertisement of blueberries...

At one point though, she was getting kind of fussy and I told Grant she was probably hungry, could he please hand her something to eat since I was driving?  I had a plastic box in the backseat right next to her filled with all kind of goodies for all of us for convenience.  This is what he picked for her.

Lime chips.

The entire bag.  Granted, it wasn't very full when he handed it to her...

But we're still dusting it out of our car.

Lime dust aside, we had a pretty smooth trip--and we really love it here!  We're so grateful to everyone who helped in every way!  We couldn't have done it without you!