Road Trip

Did you know that if you're moving across the country that you have to drive there? With 2 toddlers? And a car so full of stuff you can't move? And it's 2,400 miles away? Which is supposed to take about 36 hours, in good traffic. And you pass through 10 states?!

Yay!

We normally make the drive from Idaho to Tennessee (to visit my family) in just a straight shot. It's been an added difficulty to bring along two little kids with us, but what are our options, really? It's almost better to just get in the car and go go go til you get there, then be out of the car for a long time. In my experience it's harder to stop for a couple hours or over night several times on a long drive cuz it just makes the drive seem that much longer. Every time you get back in the car you dread the long hours spent just sitting. Well, that was my thinking before this trip.

Our house is all packed and ready to go!

We knew we weren't going to drive completely straight through because I wanted to see my family. My sister and her kids were on spring break and headed to visit home. Heidi lives in Virginia and is about 10 hours further east and in the wrong direction for it to be feasible to see her on the way. Yay for great timing! So we planned to stop in Tennessee. But that's still 27 hours to get there. How were we going to manage that? We planned to stop in North Platte, Nebraska, gross I know, but it was about halfway. And we planned to stop in Atlanta to see Michael's brother. And again in Gainesville, Florida to see one of my dear friends. So with stops in mind, I actually gained more sanity and peace of mind with a light, or several lights, at the end (middle?) of the tunnel.

We had the moving truck and all our stuff loaded and taken care of on Friday, so that was out of the way. But Michael still had 4 more days of classes to finish before we could leave town. That meant almost a week of sitting on the floor or on camp chairs, having no furniture, eating off paper dishes, etc. Then Michael found out he didn't have to stay til Thursday, but that he could actually finish up his classes by the afternoon on Wednesday. Oh man was I excited to get the heck out of Rexburg!

The car was packed to the top! I definitely get my packing skills from my Dad. 

We still had to figure out what to do with our extra car, since I'm pretty sure it would blow up if we tried to drive it that far, and driving 2 cars across the country is just ridiculous. Thankfully we have some friends that could use it while we're gone and they took it off our hands and stored some extra stuff for us as well. Worked out perfect! Then came packing the car. I didn't actually get a picture of it (dangit) but that car was so loaded with crap that it sat lower on the tires. We were only able to fit about half of the stuff we wanted to bring with us, the other half being camping stuff. We do have a cargo carrier for the top, but a big SUV wasn't going to get good gas mileage as it is, much less with adding more stuff on top of the car. We opted to leave our camping stuff behind (sniff sniff) and just take the necessities. By necessities I mean clothes, toys, fishing supplies, hairbow making supplies, and of course any expiring food from our food storage. About half of the trunk was just food. That's going to make a big difference for us since I can only imagine the cost of living difference between here and there.

Bye bye mountains. I'll miss you. 

Finally the house is all cleaned, all our stuff is out, or so we think, the car is loaded up, and we are ready to get on the road. Ivan had a heartbreaking goodbye with the neighbor's boy, Sterling and we left. We stopping in Rigby to drop the car off and actually started our long journey east. On the way we went through the Palisades. Man I love that place. Driving through it made me miss it already. And it gave us quite the send off. We saw a goose sitting in an osprey nest! It took us a long time to realize what kind of creature was in that nest, and sure enough it was a Canada goose. Just outside Alpine, WY we saw a mountain goat just chilling on the hill side. Then around Hoback Junction we saw hundreds of elk. I've never seen so many of them all together before. And it wasn't even on the wildlife reserve. Continuing on we saw probably about a thousand mule deer. And we even stopped to see a couple moose.

All those little dots out there are elk. And this was just a small portion of what we saw. 

Two moose, just hanging out. They were so chill that a magpie was hopping all over them. 

The whole time we're seeing all this wildlife, we kept telling Ivan to look out the window for the animals. Then he started telling us "there's a big elk out there," about every 5 miles. Then there actually was an elk out there when he said it and he about jumped out of his seat he was so excited! Then he switched to saying "here it comes, here it comes" when he wanted to see an animal.

We also saw antelope! 

Then we witnessed a miracle. We participated in a miracle even. We were passing a semi truck on the highway where there were 2 lanes. So we switch to the left lane to pass and there's a car in front of us on the highway. About 2 seconds later, we notice the car is not going near as fast as us and see that they have their turn signal on to turn left. Because they had their signal on, we slowed down and didn't crash into the back of them. It doesn't sound as cool written down, but it was intense.

Driving through Nebraska on Thursday we saw a ton of sandhill cranes! Seriously, hundreds and hundreds of them. Everywhere. Hundreds. 

A few other fun stories from our drive. I was reading a book to Ivan and he really enjoyed it. So I read the book again, and again, and again. At the end of reading the book for the third time, the same book mind you, Ivan says "you supposed to read it again." Ha!


We left Rexburg around 3 in the afternoon Wednesday, stopped for gas and to let the kids run and got to the hotel in Nebraska around 4 in the morning, central time. Silly time zones. The kids, and Michael slept well that night and I was up and hungry for Marriott waffles around 7:30 or 8. After loading up on an awesome breakfast, watching lots of cartoons, and getting showers, we loaded back into the car around 10 in the morning. Now we had to make it from western Nebraska to middle Tennessee in a day. Not too shabby. We did stop at a playplace for lunch so the kids could get all their energy out and Michael could take a short nap. Back in the car and we finished our drive sometime late that night.