Let the adventure begin!

Well, we miraculously were able to shove everything in our house into one, giant moving truck, said goodbye to every room in our house and hit the road! We were left with a final snowy night and a little snowy drive, and were at PaPa and Ma's in time for a late supper. Hubs and I were hitting the road on Saturday, but weren't in any big rush. That is, until we were ready to go.

Hubs started getting antsy about getting a move on, but really had no good reason, just, "I wanna get there before...it's dark?" So as we were loading up (again), Ma announced that she needed to run a quick errand and she'd be right back. Cuz had just dropped off her 2 year-old to play, so we thought it best not to leave them all unattended. So we waited.

And waited.

And waited.

Ma returned, I had to run a quick errand before we left town, and we were on the road! THAT's when it hit Hubs. We did a remote closing on our new house, so our realtor had dropped our keys in Hubs' po box. And our po box is at a place that closes at 5:00 PM. And a place that's not open on Sunday. Sunday would be the day the truck was arriving to the house we had no keys to, and according to Garmin, our arrival time was 5:04 PM.

We called the Postal Place, and the girl said, "No worries! Take your time! Call me along the way, and if it's after 5:00, I can just scoot back over. I live RIGHT around the corner." Now, if I owned a mail place and had someone coming just after closing, I would just stay until they got there, but whatever.

We pulled into the city limits and gave her a call. After 4 rings, the call went to voicemail. No problem! She probably didn't recognize the number. We left a message and continued toward the mail place. When we pulled up, we were greeted with the CLOSED sign and dark windows. So we called again. Not only was there no answer, her voicemail was full.

Uh oh.

Luckily there was a bonefish nearby, so we decided to hang out there while we waited. As we enjoyed a celebratory chardonnay, we started weighing the cost of a locksmith vs breaking a window. Then we remembered that ALL of our closing paperwork was with the keys, in the po box at the now closed postal place. And seeing as we had out-of-state licenses and out-of-state cell phone numbers, it was going to be hard to convince a locksmith to open a strange house on a pinky promise that it was ours.

Finally, after figuring out what window to break, the girl called us back and we were able to free our keys! We drove over to the house, walked around and figured we'd scoot over to the grocery store to pick up some staples to tide us over. $96 and a redbox movie later, we were ready to go! We turned right out of the parking lot and the blue lights start flashing.

AWESOME.

I was digging around through the glove box looking for the registration (which, since it's a company car, I'm not even sure it had been put in Hubs' name yet) and we were both trying desperately to figure out what law we'd broken after coming to a complete stop and driving 5 mph. Turns out, when Hubs had his oil changed that day, they hit a reset button and triggered his automatic lights so they don't come on any more. WHEW! He made sure we got the lights on, waved and said, "Welcome to Florida!" and we were off.

PaPa and Ma lent us their 2 twin air mattresses, and we bought a crackling duraflame log, so we were ready to spend our first night in the new house. We blew up the beds, got the fire going, plugged in my computer and were ready to watch a movie and relax. However, we had forgotten pillows and blankets. Oh well! It can't be that bad!

I fell asleep very early into the movie, but woke up at some point to Hubs saying (or I thought he said, anyway), "Move over, my mattress deflated." I'm not sure our two kids could share a twin air mattress comfortably much less the two of us, so needless to say, that first night's sleep was not the greatest. But I just thought about how much nicer our 32 year-old mattress was going to feel in the morning. Well, imagine my surprise when my alarm went off to glance over and see Hubs' mattress FULLY inflated. I asked him what the heck he was doing on my mattress and he said, "No, I didn't say it was deflated, I said it felt like it was deflatING." Ugh.

We made a quick trip to Starbucks and loaded up on espresso. We met the truck at 8 AM and worked non-stop until 5. We somehow managed to get just under 4000 sq feet of stuff into a just over 2000 sq ft house, and had about 80% unpacked and settled! We treated ourselves to dinner and were going to see a movie, but ended up back at the house and dead to the world before 8 PM!

And, as if we didn't have enough "stuff" in the house already, we spent Monday driving all over looking for two additional pieces of furniture and after finding them, treating ourselves to a new mattress and boxspring (Merry Christmas to us and thank you Costco!).

We tried to make up for lost time on Tuesday and finish getting everything in place. I had a job interview at 2:00, so was watching the clock. At about 11:00 AM, as we were changing out a ceiling fan in Nugget's room, the power went out. We called to report it (after I totally blamed Hubs) and found out there was a tree down and they had no clue when power would be restored. And there I stood in a t-shirt, scrub bottoms having not showered. And I needed to be clean and pretty in 1.5 hours.

The good thing about having a husband who's lived out of a hotel for the past 2 months is you can call and get a room for an hour with little to no problem. I checked into the Hampton Inn at noon, showered, got dressed and thought about calling in sick to the interview and just taking a nap in the luxuriously quiet room, packed my stuff and checked out at 1 PM. The marathon interview ended at 5, and it took me 20 minutes to get on the interstate. Not because traffic was bad, just because I kept missing the ramp. Home for 40 minutes, we loaded the car and were on the road.

LONGEST CAR RIDE EVER. We were both SO tired, but were pulling off the interstate at midnight. That's when I looked at Hubs and said, "You did get my green suitcase out of the closet, right?"

Umm no....

"But that's the suitcase I brought outside, wasn't it?!!"

"No, that was mine! You didn't get yours?!"

"I thought that WAS mine!"

So as I type, I am literally wearing Mom Jeans (as in my mom's jeans) and am thankful we threw all of our dirty clothes in a giant trash bag to wash here.

We're hoping when we welcome the kids and pup home, there will be a little adventure.