This is the long version - trust me it's long. My feelings aren't hurt if you skim, it's more of a record for me and T than a blog entry:
The week of Christmas T flew to D.C. for an interview. The Monday after Christmas they offered him a job and we took it. We spent January 8th and 9th in D.C. finding a place to live. On the 21st of January we left SoCal. We arrived in D.C. on January 26th.
T's new job gave us some money for the move. We thought about doing a U-Haul truck and both of our families offered to help us drive, but I SO did NOT want to drive a U-Haul or trailer across the country. Way too much wind and stress and money. So we did a U-Box which was cheaper and less worrisome. With a U-Box they drop a storage box at your place, you pack it, and they drop it at your new location. Well, in our case they shipped it to the nearest U-Box storage facility because there is no place to drop a box around our new apartment; it is all metered parking.
We packed up all (okay most) of our stuff in a U-Box that was 8'x7.5'x6'. We packed it Wednesday and planned to have it picked up on Thursday - my last day of work (T's last day of work was Tuesday). But on Thursday, U-Box called and said they couldn't pick it up until Friday...
We gave away our fridge to someone in the ward and they picked it up on Thursday night.
Everything we owned was packed away on Wednesday night so we slept in sleeping bags and had a few clothes and dishes and our computers out. Our apartment was so empty that it echoed. A lot.
We spent Thursday night and Friday morning cleaning. Let me tell you, that place was clean. And the apartment complex still charged us the full cleaning fee because there were a few hard water stains on the shower door! Grrr!
Anyway, our U-Box was picked up that morning. We ran a few errands and finished loading up the car and then it was goodbye SoCal. We left around noon and it was 75 degrees. T was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. We were tired from the packing and cleaning portion, but it felt good to start on the 2, 700 mile drive.
As you know we are not strangers to the cross country road trip. This one was our fourth together in the exact same car. T bought the car in Virginia his first summer working back east. At the end of that first summer T and I drove from D.C. to N.Y.C. to L.A. where T went to school. At the start of the next summer T and I drove from L.A. to D.C. And at the end of the second summer T and I drove from D.C. to L.A. to finish his last year of school. And now we are headed from L.A. to D.C. Except this time it is for more than a summer. So now the car has come full circle. Twice.
Just if you are curious we took the 40 across most of the country then switched to the 81 near Knoxville and then the 66 into D.C.
Day One - Friday the 21st: L.A., California to Flagstaff, Arizona. About 470 miles and 7.5 hours.
We decided that we would take a picture by every state sign... The quality of the pictures definitely varies from state to state. When you're on the shoulder and semi-trucks are zooming by at 80 mph and it's cold and windy sometimes you don't really care about getting the best possible picture...
I actually really like Flagstaff, it is not like any other part of Arizona. It's all mountain-y instead of desert-y. My family spent Christmas down there one year.
Anyway, as you recall T was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. When we pulled up to the hotel, it was 28 degrees outside. We had brought coats, but they were buried somewhere in the trunk. Needless to say, we were a bit chilly. We ate dinner at Ihop - where to our surprise neither one of us ordered breakfast! The hotel was mostly okay. The shower never got above luke-warm so that was a huge bummer for me. You shouldn't get out of the shower feeling colder than when you got in! Also, breakfast was just cornflakes and juice. But it wasn't a big deal.
Day Two - Saturday the 22nd: Flagstaff, Arizona to Amarillo, Texas. About 600 miles and 9 hours.
In my opinion, New Mexico does not really have much to offer. Arizona has cool rock formations but New Mexico was just flat, boring desert.
Even though the landscape of New Mexico was dull, the sky certainly was not. As we approached the Texas border we saw the most beautiful progression of a sunset behind us. Well, mostly I saw it; T was busy driving.
We got to Texas just as the sunset was ending. It was pretty nice out, so we set the timer and put the camera on the top of the car for this one.
Our last trip from D.C. to L.A. we stopped in Amarillo, too. We saw so many trucks and horse trailers in the hotel parking lot and I couldn't figure out what was going on. This time, I figured it out. Our hotel in Amarillo was literally next door to the American Quarter Horse Museum. There is also a horse racing track nearby. We thought about visiting the museum, but it was $6 per adult and we're not that big of horse fanatics.
We had Papa John's for dinner and I took an extremely long shower to make up for the two minute one I took in Flagstaff. The hotel breakfast was awesome. There were lots of choices but mostly it was awesome because of the Texas waffles!
Day Three - Sunday the 23rd: Amarillo, Texas to Bentonville, Arkansas. About 480 miles and 8 hours
I feel like we really cranked it out on this day. We passed through Oklahoma pretty quickly. But oh, was it windy! From this point on the trip I was extremely glad we decided against driving a U-Haul or pulling a trailer!
It was strange to drive in Arkansas in the winter. I've only ever driven through in the summer and everything everywhere is just so green. Obviously in the winter it is pretty much all dead. But on the plus side, that means the giant spider / spiderwebs that look big enough to trap children in are also dead. I promise that blurry sign in the background says "Arkansas." Really.
You might have noticed on the map that Bentonville isn't on the 40. We took a little detour to see my brother J and his family. We stayed with them for a few days. It was a nice break from driving. It was great to see them. I'm going to skip the Arkansas part here because it has so many pictures it will be a separate post.
Day Four - Monday the 24th: Playing in Arkansas.
Day Five - Tuesday the 25th: Bentonville, Arkansas to the far east side of Knoxville, Tennessee. About 740 miles and 11 hours.
This was scheduled to be the longest day of driving of our trip. We were glad we had that day of rest before we headed out. It rained almost all day. We didn't get a photo of the sign entering Tennessee. That's because the border of Arkansas / Tennessee is the Mississippi River. So the sign was on the bridge and there wasn't a pedestrian walkway and there were signs that said "no stopping at any time." I wasn't with it enough to take a photo on the bridge, so here is one from this site on the internet:
T and I decided that if the weather was nice, when we crossed from Tennessee to Virginia, we would take a picture with the Virginia sign then turn around on the freeway to get one with the TN sign then head back into VA.
We both totally wanted Panda Express for dinner. But we couldn't find one anywhere close to the freeway at all. Eventually google maps found one for us in a mall food court that was only a mile off the freeway. We walked around that entire mall and there was so not a Panda Express. Google maps lied! (This is not the first time - most of the time google maps lies to us about the location of grocery stores. It even happened again today.) So we ended up eating soup and a sandwich from the food court.
We decided to stay on the far east side of Knoxville to make our last day of driving that much shorter. The hallway of the hotel that we stayed in absolutely reeked of smoke, even though all the rooms on that floor were supposedly non-smoking. Like "hold your breath as you run from the elevator to your room it smells so bad" smoke smell. Luckily, our room didn't smell like smoke.
Breakfast there was... interesting. There was cream cheese but no bagels, a sign that said to microwave the biscuits, but no microwave, eggs but no ketchup. We ended up eating cereal. Which, for the record, we are totally fine with. We eat cereal everyday for breakfast. :)
Day Six - Wednesday the 26th: Knoxville, Tennessee to D.C. About 450 miles and 7.5 hours.
We planned to get to our new D.C. place around 3:00 p.m. That way we would have time to go over the lease and move all of our stuff in before it got too late. We had been watching TV the night before and as usual nothing was on (this is why I don't feel bad at all that we don't have a TV). But we did catch the weather. The forecast was for a rain / snow mix across TN. T and I decided we would get up at 6:00 a.m. and leave as soon as we were ready to try to avoid some of the storm / traffic.
We knew we might be in trouble when we were watching a bit of the morning news and multiple school districts had closed for the day... It was raining when we left about 6:45 a.m. and T drove first. When we switched around 9:00 a.m. the rain had stopped and there were a few snowflakes floating down. We thought that perhaps we had gotten in front of the storm. We were SO wrong.
The weather and roads just kept getting worse. The speed limit was 70 and at first I was doing 50. Semi-trucks and other cars kept speeding by me. The worst was the semi-trucks because they would come up quick behind and not change lanes until they were almost running us over, then they would splash the windshield so badly I couldn't see anything even though the wipers were going full blast.
Then we started seeing the slide-offs. And cars that had flipped. And cars that had jumped the guard rail. There were some pretty bad accidents that brought traffic to about 5 mph, which I was fine with because I knew we wouldn't get hurt going that slow. The weather got worse and we were going about 35 mph. I had driven for about three hours and told T I needed a break. My fingers were sore from clutching the steering wheel so hard. We were definitely off track from making it to the apartment by 3:00 p.m.
At this point, it seemed like the snow was letting up. And it did for about half an hour.
We stopped to take the photo with the Virginia sign and decided against getting out of the car because it was stormy and cold. Plus we didn't want someone to careen off the road and hit us. So this was the first photo:
Luckily, there was a rest stop just a mile ahead that also had a Virginia sign. We were pretty sure we wouldn't get hit here. Needless to say we didn't turn around on the freeway to get a photo with the Tennessee sign. We just kept going. I was tired and wanted to take a nap, but I was too nervous to nap.
Then it got worse again. The snow was accumulating on the roads, kind of a lot. We didn't see any plows or any plowed sections. We just saw a lot of this:
T drove in the storm for about 3 hours then we got lunch at a Panda Express. Yes, we found one! The parking lot had two cars in it and lots of fresh snow. T was tempted to do donuts, but we didn't want to risk getting in an accident in the parking lot when were were SO close to the end of the road trip. We did have fun running and sliding on the snow once we got out, though.
We were the only customers in Panda. Kinda strange. We could see that the parking lot of the big shopping complex across the way was almost completely empty. The roads where we stopped for lunch were mostly clear so we had high expectations of reaching our new apartment by 4:30. T called to let the apartment complex know we were on our way. They told us they were open until 6:00 p.m. so we thought we had plenty of time.
Luckily we got got onto the 66 before two semi-trucks jack knifed on the 81 or we would have been stuck for hours. As it was, it felt like we were stuck for hours anyway. The last 10 miles took us 2 hours. The freeway still hadn't been plowed. Our windshield wipers had so much snow on them that they stopped working. We had to pull over and T scraped the snow off with his hands (the snow scraper was still buried somewhere in the trunk). People were abandoning their cars on the freeway.
When we exited the freeway things didn't get any better. Nothing had been plowed. We saw cars sliding down hills even though their tires weren't moving. It was 5:40 p.m. I called the apartment and asked if they could pretty please stay open until we got there - We thought we would be there shortly after 6:00. Usually the drive from the freeway to our new apartment would take about 7 minutes. At six we had only gone one block, so I called the apartment again. Our leasing agent K said she would stay until about 6:45. K had been wonderful before and now we like her even more.
We made it to the apartment at 6:45. We saw 19 slide-offs and it took us 12 hours instead of 7.5 but we made it. T dropped me off to get started on the papers while he parked the car and ran across the street to get our money order. K was just wonderful. I can't believe she waited for us to arrive. We bought her flowers on Friday because she deserved them.
We moved everything in from the car then realized we didn't have anything to eat for dinner. We thought about heading back out to the grocery store, but decided against that pretty quickly. We ran across the street to the Rite Aid. It was a joke. We were just going to get cereal and milk, but they didn't have any milk and a box of cereal was $5! So we got pop-tarts for breakfast and pasta for dinner (we did bring two pots in addition to a few dishes). This is the view from our balcony.
I know it doesn't look that bad, especially compared to the Midwest's recent "snowmageddon," but this is the most snow we have seen since we got engaged on Christmas in 2008. The freeways really did get worse, but it was so dark that none of the pictures turned out. I'm just glad we were driving into D.C. and not out of it - traffic was MUCH worse going the other way. I heard multiple stories of a 40 minute commute taking 9 hours! I'm glad T did most of the driving our last day - he's amazing!
Then we slept on the floor in our sleeping bags. And that's what we will be doing until this Saturday when we unload our U-Box.
The End.
For the record, we didn't get a single speeding ticket on any of our cross-country trips! Go Team!
Wow, that was quite the treck for you guys! I'm glad you made it safely. And 10 stars for no speeding tickets! :)
ReplyDeleteYou guys are pros! Scary all that blizzard driving. Fun photos!!
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