Road Trip - Pt. 1

*Sigh* Nick and I are finally back home. Well, we've been back since Monday, but we've been enjoying relaxing, seeing friends and family, and running around outside in the absolutely beautiful and perfect weather. We've also been exhausted and trying to catch up on sleep from the last week leading up to the long long long drive and the long drive itself! Since it's been awhile, I'll catch you up.

Remember my last post about packing? It didn't get any better. It got a little worse. Nick did a ton of work Wednesday and Thursday shipping boxes we knew wouldn't fit and getting the furniture out. Thankfully we found people to take the couches and chairs, and anything we put out by the dumpster that was usable was usually taken by people in our apartment complex pretty quickly! I had someone I sold my bed to the morning we left, and since we had a lot done (or so we thought), we had a final breakfast with Andrew at his apartment. After that we thought we would totally be gone by 1 or 2.... we were very very wrong.

After breakfast we shipped a couple more boxes and came back and started packing the car up. This is when things got very stressful. We thought we had shipped enough, but the car is a lot smaller than we thought. Plus, once we put a few things in there, it filled up fast, and we were running out of ideas. A near panic attack on my part, some tears (again, on my part), a lot of frustration, a few more thrown out items we wanted to take, and another shipped box later, we figured out the car situation. Yes, this was already the second trip to buy boxes at the U-Haul place and a second trip to the post office, where we finally remembered to fill out our forward address forms not only because we needed to, but to get a copy of that to our gym, which, of course, was on the other side of town. You would think we would have realized we should go to the post office closer to that side, but we were a little distracted I guess. We finally got that squared away and were able to get the rest of the stuff out of the apartment and actually get to take showers, which seemed to help a bit. At that point, it was finding a few more small places for our bags and a couple extra things we needed to take with us. This is when I finally calmed down a bit and admired the empty apartment, with both overwhelming happiness and also a little bit of sadness. It was the first place we shared together, and although we were excited to get out of Decatur, it was a little bittersweet. 

[So happy]

Of course, I quickly got over it once we got in the car, dropped off our keys, and hit the road.

I took the first leg of the trip since Nick was going to drive all night, and it took me a little bit to relax and realize that, yes, we were actually leaving. I was a little on edge and exhausted from the day, and of course another storm was coming through when we were getting close to Missouri (not going to miss those!), so I gladly gave the wheel to Nick around 10 pm when we stopped for gas. Let me tell you, I cannot drive at nighttime. I don't know how he likes driving at night so much, but I'm sure glad he does. He drove us all the way through Nebraska, which is great, because there isn't much to look at and it's a lot of straight, wide open road. 

[Waking up in Nebraska after driving all night]

[Lookin' good from the roadtrip]

The car did surprisingly well with how much stuff was in it and with the bike attached to the back. When I took over the next morning we were right outside of Wyoming, which was much prettier to look at. This is when we started seeing mountains and hills. The hills weren't so great on the car, but I was just happy to have something to look at!

[The Golden Arches - Our saving grace in the morning]

We switched after a few more hours right before we FINALLY got off I-80 (we had to drive on it for 733 miles) and onto US-30 West to Idaho. We hit the border and stopped for fireworks - Nick had been dying to buy some ever since we had started seeing firework stands pop up all over Wyoming. He's a bit of a firework fanatic, haha. After that little stop we drove 3 more hours until we got to Pocatello, Idaho where my sister and brother-in-law live and welcomed the chance to rest and recuperate! We actually made great time. They were surprised at how early we got there - about 4 pm. It was so nice to see them again since I hadn't seen them since Christmas, and we had a lot of fun hanging out with them and of course their pup, Lola :) I'll post more about the rest of our roadtrip later!