And we're off...

Abe and I hit the road a little before noon on Saturday (which was our goal!). We had finished jamming all our crap into the pod by playing the biggest game of Tetris ever on Friday morning. We were pretty proud of ourselves that we fit as much of our stuff into that 6x7x8 foot cube that we did (and I must give props to our professional moving consultant Travis for that). Then the cleaning commenced, and I must say we left the place much cleaner than it was than when we moved in, so we better get all of our deposit back! Friday night I had one last rendezvous with the girls - we went to see the Sex in the City movie (which is great if you're a fan of the show and have been missing it for the past few years)! Then we met up for dinner with some more friends, including the boys. We had a very nice last supper together and said our sad goodbyes in the parking lot - Abe and I had to get back to finish the cleaning and let Ika out.

So, back to the point of this post. We drove [almost] straight through to Denton, TX. I say almost because we did stop to sleep at a rest area for a couple hours. We exited Florida as darkness was falling (I never realized how huge FL is!), drove through Alabama, Mississippi fairly quickly, and into Louisiana. I chose to drive south through New Orleans since I had never been there. Not that I would really get to experience it, but I at least wanted to see it. It was around 11pm local time there, so I got the nighttime view of the city. I guess I never realized what a big city New Orleans is. I saw the dark shadowy form of the Superdome which hit me emotionally a little bit. And driving through on the interstate just made me want to come back and visit this city for real someday. (And that's a pretty impressive thing for a drive by on the highway to do for me.) We drove up Louisiana on I49 and stopped right after we got into Texas on I20. We awoke in the morning, let the dog run around for a little bit, and hit the road once again on our final leg to Denton.

When we arrived at my Aunt Ellen, Uncle Dave, and Uncle Bill's house, no one was to be found - they were all still in bed! We worked on waking them up, which we eventually did, and had a really nice time with them. Mariah had fun playing with Ika, Kady, Bryan and AJ came over (Kady bringing with her a box of old photos for me from Grandma's collection which we had fun going through, and AJ in his superman costume), Uncle Bill came home from work, and Ellen picked up Grandma Goeke for dinner. We're still here, enjoying the feeling of not being in a car for a little while longer. We're taking my Grandma Goeke out to lunch this afternoon and will probably do a little window shopping in the Denton Square. We'll stay for dinner again tonight and enjoy our time with some family we hardly ever get to see (but will hopefully come and visit us in OR), and we plan on hitting the road after dinner and heading to Phoenix.

More to come from our next destination...

Edit: I'm very upset that for whatever reason I cannot edit posts from my iPhone, so, I can only update when we stop and find wireless connections. I'm going to file a complaint with Apple about this! I thought iPhones could do anything!