A Busy Week

When most people drive 2600+ miles across the country, they probably spend a few days relaxing. Not us.

After celebrating my mother's birthday in Lexington on the 22nd, we did relax a bit on the 23rd. However, on the 24th, I had to get an oil change, and then drive to Roanoke to do all the Christmas shopping I hadn't been able to do either overseas or driving across this large country of ours. When we came home, it was time to get ready for Christmas dinner, and then wrap all the presents we bought earlier. Before we knew it, it was 2 AM on Christmas Eve/Day, so it was time to go to bed.

We had a great Christmas Day, but got off to a slightly late start, and then drove down to Tarboro, NC, to visit my grandmother and mom's side of the family. While we had a great time, it was another 4 hours of driving after a relatively full week of traveling.

So, on the 26th, surely we went without driving, right? Wrong. We had a family reunion in the small burg of Ahoskie, NC, home of my great uncle.

The 27th? If you guessed more driving, you're either a Pavlovian dog, or you're beginning to pick up on the theme of this entry. We bade farewell to my family and headed to Raleigh to find our new home, hopefully as quickly as possible. We assumed it would take us a couple of days to find an apartment, but we were able to find one relatively quickly (more in another entry).

Because of how quickly we were able to find a great apartment, we then had the choice of either staying in Raleigh in a friend's house, with the friends on vacation, or going ahead and driving to Huntsville. If our friends had been in town, we would have stayed, but as it was, we decided to drive the 580 miles or so to Huntsville.

As the bulk of the southeastern US is mired in a substantial drought, rain is great, but it certainly didn't make for the easiest driving conditions, particularly through the mountains of I-40 along the NC/TN border. But, we made it, despite one of my new windshield wipers deciding that it didn't want to remain locked. Fortunately, we were right near an exit when this happened, but the locking mechanism on the windshield wiper broke, so the wiper completely popped out. We were able to see through the rain-covered windshield to find an auto parts store in Winston-Salem, and replace it.

That excitement aside, it looks like we finally get to stay put for a few days! We're pretty excited about it, and we're equally excited that we got to see our cats again. We hadn't seen them since late October (me)/early November (Erin), so we were definitely happy to see our guys again. They have certainly enjoyed having a big house to roam around in during our absence.

I'm curious to figure out roughly how many miles we've traveled in the last couple of months. Maybe I'll post it in another entry if I can find some of the mileages that we traveled within South America.

Rob