The freeway here, primarily Interstate 10, is going through a lot of construction. I think they are widening it. Anyway, it is really bad! Four or five on/off ramps are shut down, lanes are narrower than usual, and speed limits range from 55 mph to 75 mph. So that gives you a little glimpse of the freeway…

In Idaho we say, “There are two seasons, winter and construction.” Well, apparently here they say there is summer and construction. (However, I bet it’s really only one season here… )

On our second day in our house, I had a few things that needed to get done. First, I received a phone call from an electrician. He needed to get into the house to replace a ceiling fan & wanted to know if I would be home. Today was the day that I needed to return the U-Haul … I told him that later in the afternoon would be better. He was agreeable. Shortly after that call, I received another… The car carrier service wants to deliver hubby’s car. They had two delivery times, morning or afternoon. Again, I said that afternoon would be better…

So, it is about 10 am, I figure I’ll go to Green Valley to drop of the trailer, right? Well first problem, I had no map. Second problem, my GPS wasn’t working, couldn’t even get internet on my cell phone… Really weird. So, as I am driving to Green Valley, I decide I’ll call and find out where the U-Haul is located. Ya gotta love (800) GOOG-411!

The woman who answered the U-Haul phone first asks me a series of questions, you know, did you get the trailer here, where did you get if from, where does your contract say you will take it… etc. Well, apparently you can’t take your one way U-Hauls back to just any dealer. You have take it to the city that is in your contract. I didn’t know that. Also, it is best to call their toll-free number to find out which of their franchises can take the extra trailer. The one nearest my home in “Tucson” was full.

The toll-free person for U-Haul told me that the nearest available franchise was in a small town east of where I was by about 15 miles. So I drove to Corona de Tucson… Guess what, yeah, there was construction. Ugh!

I was so glad to get rid of the trailer! Yay!

One thing I forgot to mention… When I left the house, I found out that the key that I had didn’t work in the lock. Apparently we were given 2 different keys. So this meant that I had to drive to the agency to get another key.

After dropping the trailer, I had to ask how to get to the street that my rental agency is on… Since there are 4 or 5 on/off ramps that are closed on the freeway, I knew the one I needed was probably one that was closed.

I had to drive about 10 miles to get onto the I-10… then I had to get off early and drive through town to get to where I needed to be, because my exit was closed and I didn’t have a map or GPS… Now it is about 12 noon…

It was horrible. I started in the far southwest end of Tucson, the went to the far southeast end, then up to the Northeast end, only to have to go to the Northwest end and back down to the Southwest end again. To Tucsonians, I only drove to the center of town. I never got to the far north…

It took an hour and a half to get from one side of Tucson proper to the other. I did stop at Carl’s Jr. to get my boys some lunch. I finally got to the rental agency, got the new key and decided to try GPS again. I was able to get one reading of a map on my phone before service went down again… I am not that stupid though, I did stop to buy a map. On my way home, I called the electrician to tell him I would be late… didn’t matter to him, he was running late too! However, I get about half way home, I get half way home when I get a call … the car carrier has arrived and nobody is at my house to receive the car. Well, duh! I’m now on Interstate 19! Geez! The driver was half an hour early!

Lucky for me, he waited. I got home and never wanted to leave again. Later that night, my husband took me back to Green Valley for food. I was supposed to have shopped for groceries… yikes!

All in all I covered 77 miles on day two.

More later!

Technorati Tags: Downtime, Personal Note

Well, we have been here in Sahuarita, Arizona (Find on Google Maps)for 12-days now. My brother and sister-in-law did warn us that the Tucson area was immense. I’ll get to this in a bit.

First day in Sahuarita (pronounced Saw wah ree ta, according to Wikipedia.com), I had to go to the management company to pick up keys to the house. My sister-in-law was nice enough to drive me there, since I still had the U-Haul trailer hooked up and I wasn’t comfortable navigating with a tail. It took about 30 minutes to get there. From there, she ran me back to her house to get my truck with tail and then she guided me all the way to our home. This took another 30 minutes to get back to her home, then 45 minutes to an hour to get all the way to my house. God bless her!

So, we get to the house, and I have to run through the house making sure that I have marked down any problems in the house; ie. holes in the walls, stains in the carpet, etc… for the rental agency. Before I am done, the moving company arrives. They come in 2 trucks, one for my stuff, and the other for the men who will unload my stuff. (Trying to paint a picture here…) So the driver of the big rig pulls up to the most convenient location in front of our house, which happened to be in front of the whole neighborhood’s mail boxes. Yes, this was problematic.

Anyway, in very short order they began to offload all my boxes and furniture. Now they had to start at noon that day because I couldn’t get the key and get down there any earlier. So this was a complaint that I heard a few times from the movers. However, they miraculously unloaded and set up beds and other furniture in 6 hours! During that time, my water hadn’t been turned on yet and we had no food. Yippee! Now, I can handle that for longer than I should, but my growing boys couldn’t. They were like hungry birds peeping for their mother to feed them. Not fun.

Around 2 pm, like clockwork, I assume, the postal worker comes to deliver the mail… She was not happy to find a HUGE semi-truck in front of her banks of mailboxes. I walked over to her in her postal truck & apologized for this inconvenience. Actually, I figured she had a bag that she could walk over to the boxes & deliver, but I was wrong…I guess. She made sure to let me know that I was going to make 30 + families very upset that their mail did not arrive. (Personally, missing a day of mail wouldn’t bother me… one less bill, you know what I mean?) Anyway I negotiated with her and explained that I was new to the neighborhood and that we were working very hard to get done. I guess she realized that I meant no harm to her or her job… She lightened up a bit then asked if we could have the truck moved within 2 hours, at which point she would return to deliver the mail. We agreed.

Once the movers were done and gone, we ordered pizza and pretty much called it a night. We CALLED for pizza & had it delivered! We haven’t been able to do that for 5 years! Sure has gotten expensive to get delivery. Geez!

We couldn’t watch TV that night because, apparently you’re not suppose to turn the TV on for 24-hrs after unloading from a move… something to do with the TV tube being cold and exploding. *Midas Shrug* So we ate, unpacked a bit more stuff and went to bed. End day one…

Oh yeah, the mail did go through!

More later…

Technorati Tags: Downtime, Personal Note

Over the past three months our family has gone through some huge changes, namely our location!

In September of this year, my husband & I received a call from my brother asking for my husband’s resume. You see, we have been searching for better employment for 5 years or so… He has been working for University of Idaho but really wanted to find something more. So, when my brother called and asked us to send his resume, we got excited.

I emailed his resume to my brother & to the person who had the opening offered. Within about a week, Marty received a call & was interviewed over the phone. Later, he was called again & a personal face to face interview was arranged. He was flown to Tucson, Arizona where he spent half a week or so going through a “job fair” and interviews for this new position. He came home with a fresh excitement to him. (Perhaps it was just me excited for him.) Anyway, we had to wait a week or so before we heard whether the powers that be wanted him to work for them. This all happened in a course of about 3 weeks. The offer finally came! Yeehaw!! He got himself another job, a better job… but, it meant moving to another state… Ugh! (I HATE moving!)

Anyone who knows us, also knows that we are pack rats! I will go as far to say that Marty is the biggest of them all. We had about 6 weeks to ready ourselves for our move. The company paid to pack and move us, which was wonderful… However, when you have as much stuff as we do, you KNOW without doubt something has to go! I thank the Lord for the Salvation Army. They came to my rescue by dropping by our house and picking up truckloads of stuff. We had bikes, clothes, toys, toys, or and toys to get rid of. Most things that I kept because I either wanted it for my “daughter” for her kids (I don’t have a daughter.) or things that I thought I might use later on down the road for whatever purpose… well, it went bye-bye. Broken toys, torn clothes (even the smallest tear), & many other items went to the trash.

Even after all of that, we still has stuff to get rid of, but at this point it was too late. The movers arrived and they started packing! It took them 3-days to pack our whole house and our HUGE garage/shop. They were amazing! Our lives were packed onto this semi-truck and carted away.

The following day, now this is November 26th, the day before Thanksgiving, we began our journey from Genesee, Idaho to Tucson, Arizona. It took 4-days to drive. We had our pod on the top of our truck and a U-Haul trailer behind us all the way. We packed all four of us plus our large german shepherd dog into our truck. Pillows, DVD players, game consoles, ice chest, laptop, books, dog cookies, doggy poop bags, and any other things that we “needed” for our journey were stuffed into the truck. The excitement was thick!

Thanks to the help of AAA, all hotels/motels were set up and waiting for us. Our first stop was to be Mountain Home, Idaho. Our boys were so excited to stay in a hotel… They didn’t seem to care that they had to sleep together on the same bed.

Our next day of travel was Thanksgiving Day. We drove to Nephi, Utah. Let me tell you, if you blink while looking for Nephi, you might miss it all together! But some how there was a Best Western motel there.

Now, I have been in many different types of hotels/motels, but for the most part, I like Best Westerns. There is one problem though… There’s no room service! The only place we found open for dinner on THANKSGIVING DAY, was a truck stop. There was an all you can eat Buffet in the truck stop. We got there just in time to eat the remnants of a turkey dinner. It was very, very good eats! Yum! (You know, buffets are a great place to eat for cheap when you have growing boys!) We waddled back to our motel room all rollie-pollie.

Half way done with our drive, we continued our journey to Henderson, Nevada. We really did not want to go through Las Vegas. We would have preferred to go the north rim of the Grand Canyon, but truthfully, with trailer in tow, “Lost Wages” was the safest way to go. It’s a good thing too, because our truck started giving us trouble. Our EGR valve in our SUV started to act up. It gets clogged and chokes the engine… However, my husband has the magic touch. He took a 1-inch thick dowel and hammered the EGR. Within minutes we were on the road again.

Las Vegas, in my opinion, is very ugly during the daytime, but at night, it lights up so pretty! We were amazed at the power consumption used in that city alone. Our boys and I agree, Las Vegas could probably end the West Coast rolling brown outs.

The hotel in Henderson was really nice. We ate at a casino and then went to our room for a movie. We watched Wall-e on my laptop. Yes, small screen, but it was so much fun!

Amazingly, our boys were still excited to get to Tucson. One would think they’d be exhausted and want to go “home” from all the travel. Not them! Yes, they were tired of being cramped up in a small SUV… They were tired of each other, but they were more excited to see their cousins and their new home.

Saturday morning was to be our last day of travel. Our route was planned. We had a 6-hour drive ahead of us and Lasagna waiting for us at my brother’s house. We started our last leg of our journey. Quite truthfully, I found this the most fun of all. We got to drive across the Hoover Dam. You don’t realize how massive it is until you drive over it. It was gorgeous! I took some pictures of it too!

Hoover Dam after crossing to the Arizona side.

There was a lot of construction going on there at the dam. Apparently there is concern of all the traffic on the dam… So they are constructing a new bridge to take traffic off the dam itself.

New Construction over the Hoover Dam

Here they were raising a section of the new bridge.

After crossing Hoover Dam, we had miles and miles of rock formations, desert, & lots of road. We thought things were going smoothly & that we just might make it to Tucson in time for dinner until about 12 miles out from Wickenburg, Arizona, we hit some major traffic. This wasn’t your normal “big city” traffic. We were on a two lane highway. This traffic came to a stand still. People got out of there vehicles on the highway. I call them Looky-Loos! Anyway, we sat there for a while hoping to hear something about what had happened and what should be done… Finally, someone came through and spread the word that the highway had been shut down. Wow! Shut down!

Well, not long ago I bought this new fancy smartphone. I have internet, messaging, etc… I had been using the GPS on this phone… new toy you know… I realized that if we turned around, we could go back a few miles and take a smaller highway and detour around this mess. It was 30 miles off our normal route, but it was far better than sitting in the heat waiting for who knows what. We were low on gas & all of us had to use the facilities.

I was very glad for Google Maps!

All in all, our journey was exciting and rich.

More later…

Technorati Tags: Downtime, Personal Note