Just as when we left Blacksburg, there were tears on our last day. It felt eerie having no one else around; I think that's the only move where we had no one helping us close the truck and keeping us company. At one point, someone we only just befriended brought us chocolate chip cookies! And our realtor stopped by to keep us up to date about re-listing the house. But we closed the truck (with great effort!), we took our family drive around Pueblo to say goodbye, and then, much later than we'd intended, we drove away.
I decided there are too few pictures of me on this thing. Here I am, fooling around in the hotel room where I'm dog-sitting while the rest of the family eats. I was interested in the effect of humidity on my hair; we were in Kansas.
Our only real break in the journey was in St. Louis, where our dear friends of 10 years now, Josh and Melissa, put us up again in their beautiful home. The VBS program on Sunday gave us a kid-free opportunity for a walk; some of our only alone time of the move. What a blessing! Downtown St. Louis is lovely and quiet and contains some very hip coffee shops.
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| A Missourian baby robin greeted us! |
And the kids clustered up for a pic. This was our first visit with two month old Micah! He is a truly beautiful baby, and totally gave me the baby rabies again. Yikes....
I spent lot of time in parking lots, which is what happens when you drive two vehicles with two cats and a dog across the country and still want to eat. I loved that we found a Big Boy's! I vividly remember climbing onto that thing's head, and only really getting mild disapproval from my parents, which makes me feel better about the things I've been too tired to stop my kids from doing.
When you break down the drive, it oddly seems to take less time. On our last travel day, we finally got to see a Great Lake. Here's Erie:
And suddenly, we were in Rochester, unloading our summer baggage into his waiting little house. He's been living in the basement since we arrived to fill his house with noise and stuff! Pray for Dad.
The next day, we got our Wegmans Shoppers Club Card!!! Only three days later, we got our Monroe County Library Card. (We've since acquired NYS licenses and plates and... other things...).
We also got ourselves a Strong Museum Membership! This has to be the most valuable membership in town, over the zoo as the zoo is really only usable for half the year. The Museum of Play is going to get us THROUGH this winter.
Here, Adele sorts mail at One History Place in the Strong:
This is one of my favorite nooks in the museum, upstairs behind the arcade. It's got like 20 floor games, including dodgeball and dance and jump rope games, and I've gotten sweaty and closed my watch rings on this glowing mat.
Since Jon started work on June 28th, I've spent most of my time at Dad's house. I only have a car about half or 2/3 of the time, as Jon's carpool (the lovely and esteemed Allison Brown) can't ALWAYS take him to work when he wants to be there. We have cobbled through, though, thanks to help from Dad's fiance, Agnes, who loans us her car so generously. (We can't buy our second car until we close on our new house for debt-to-income reasons; we know we need a second car).
So I've made a LOT of use out of the park down the street from Dad's house. There's a dog park just around the corner! And these guys are either at each other's throats or in a close confederation. They have "secret meetings" almost every day. I try to be mature and not barge in on them suddenly.
We hit the fireworks at Henrietta Town Park this year.
And, it's looking like, we're going to see them there kind of a lot in the future...
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