Chapter 4 Begins

One thing I discovered on our cross country journey is that a lot of places still do not have Internet access. So what I had intended to write about on our journey never happened. Now I will get you caught up.

After seeing Mt Rushmore and Wall SD, we headed on to Wyoming & Montana. Two incredibly beautiful states, that if you have never seen I highly recommend visiting at least once in your lifetime. We scheduled in to our travel a day off to explore Yellowstone and I’m so glad we did. Not only did it give us a much needed break from the long days of driving, but it was also a chance to see a part of our country (and earth) that is so vastly different from anything else I’ve ever seen before. We have pictures (still in the camera) that I will post later. I hope they capture the beauty of what we saw. It was also a learning experience for Amy – which made it that much more fun for us to see it through her eyes too.

Once our day off was done we had two more days of driving and then we finally arrived in the greater Seattle area Sunday afternoon. After finding the hotel and dropping off the animals, we headed out to start our search for somewhere to live. We managed to see four places Sunday afternoon. There were a couple that were contenders, but we wanted to take at least one more day to look around. So after a night of rest we began the search again Monday morning. Thankfully it only took us about half the day to see the rest of the places on our list and we were able to settle on a place Monday afternoon. Lease papers were signed Tuesday and the fun of moving began all over again.

This time was a little easier since we didn’t have as many stairs to deal with and we were only unloading a 10 foot U haul that contained our clothes and other belongings that we had at my parents/or that didn’t fit into the PODS when we loaded them back in May. The first of the two PODS with our remaining stuff wouldn’t be delivered until Friday so the fun of eating out & eating off of paper plates (and sleeping on the floor) continued.

Not to bore you with all the details I’ll skip ahead now.

Dean started work on Monday and has had a good week so far. He is enjoying his new job, learning a lot, and eventually will become a permanent employee/team lead for the company where he is currently a contractor. Amy started school on Wednesday and has already made two new friends and has a bus buddy she rides with as well. In some regards school is different here than it was back east. One of the big changes is when the school year starts and ends as well as the time of day school starts. Both are later than what we were used to, so that has been an adjustment for all of us. There is a lot more diversity as well – which is a good thing too.

Being that we are in Redmond, a suburb of Seattle, we are a lot closer to all the amenities than we were in Rome. For me that has been the biggest adjustment. It takes me less than 10 minutes (with traffic) to be at any one of the shopping places (Whole Foods, Fred Meyer, Safeway, Macy’s, etc…) the post office, or anywhere else that I might need to go. If there is something that I can’t find here, Seattle is less than a half hour away – much closer than Atlanta was too. One thing I will have to get used to is not buying so much. When we lived in Rome and would have to drive to Atlanta for things I would have a tendency to stock up on multiples of items. Now that we are in an apartment, I don’t have the same room as we had in the house. But I can also buy in smaller quantities too. So it will be an adjustment for a little while.

So here we are. We have one more PODS to empty – that will be next weekends project. Some stuff will go into local storage, other stuff will get put away in the apartment, and other stuff will be donated. Maybe once things have calmed down I’ll take a friends advice and sit down and write out our journey in more detail for anyone else who decides to embark on an adventure like this.

And now we return to your regular “Brain Drops” whatever that may be