Long drive

This past week, Sara and I spent in Las Vegas, packing up the rest of our stuff. As always, it never seems like there's all that much, but when you start packing and loading the moving van, it takes forever. On the bright side, we got all three motorcycles into the van, as well as everything else that still needed going, with room to spare. Our garage now looks much better:




Every garage benefits from a few motorcycles in it!

The drive itself was, as the title says, long. We loaded up thursday evening with the help of friends, and had breakfast with the Mihy's friday morning, then headed out right afterwards. The damn truck basically shook itself apart above 65mph, so it was slow going. Weather was fine all the way up to Salt Lake (roughly), where we stopped first to say hello to Jen and Kent, then drove the short distance to Shaner's house where we stayed the night.

Pleasant evening spent with Shane and Paula, who had a fantastic dinner waiting for us when we got there, and made a fabulous breakfast the next morning before we once again hit the road (thanks guys! Yummy!). All through the previous afternoon and evening, the radio was announcing a bad storm, which had us worried. But the next morning, no storm had materialized, though it was now predicted for that day. We thought about it for a while and decided to ignore the clueless weather people and go ahead and go.

We hit Pocatello, ID a few hours later to pick up the kids at Giz and Brew's place, which is really cool. I liked the views. We didn't spend a lot of time there, so I didn't get to see much of the property, which is a bummer, but what little I saw, I really liked. It was starting to snow a little just as we were driving up to their house, so we wanted to get back on the road.

Off we headed again, with Romeo in the back and the kids and sara in the front with me. At the bottom of the hill we stopped at a gas station to fuel up and check on romeo, who, we were sure, was just scared as hell after being put in the back of the uhaul, where it's dark and cold and bouncy (down the hill), and we were right. Poor Guy was shaking like a leaf when we let him out and it had only been maybe 10-15 minutes. But we expected this. We calmed him down and reassured him, then headed on. The next time we stopped and checked on him, he was shaking MUCH less, and the time after that, he wasn't shaking at all, and even jumped up into the crate all by himself.

Just north of Pocatello, we started hitting some serious snowfall, as well as slushy snow on the highway. No real problem, however. it's not the first time I've driven in snow, and this was just a bit of slush, though visibility was down somewhat. It also didn't last too long, and the rest of the drive up to Butte, MT (over a pass) was uneventful and devoid of snow.

We hit snow again after Butte, once we turned onto I-90 to head west to Missoula. Visibility was pretty bad, since it was now night, and the blowing snow in the headlights can be pretty disorienting. A good lesson to talk to kids about, who are both going to be driving this next year (auri is already taking classes!). But all in all, the rest of the drive was uneventful as well, and we made it home to frenchtown by 11:30pm.

Before hitting the sack (we were all exhausted, not just from a long drive, but from being cooped up in the uhaul for so many hours in close quarters), we unloaded maybe 1/3 of the uhaul, so we could create some space in the back around the freezer full of food we had packed 3 days previously. Most everything still seemed to be frozen pretty solidly, with only a few juices liquified. We plugged in the freezer, made sure it was working, and went off to bed.

The next day, we unloaded most of the rest, including the motorcycles shown above (yay!), and made good progress distributing it throughout the house. The heaviest items we left for monday, when our neighbor Bob could come help us with them. Then we returned the uhaul and I was glad to be rid of that shaking monstrosity.

Now we have the house full of boxes again. We had JUST pretty much unpacked the last of the boxes and got the place cleaned up, before going down to vegas to get more junk :-) Now the house is once again full of boxes, which we'll spend the next few weeks unpacking.

Isn't moving fun?!