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…

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