VA to FL

On June 23, Garrett's intern program threw his class a "graduation" at the local country club in Virginia.  It was kind of strange to "graduate" from intern year, but everyone was required to be there (I think this was their way of making sure people didn't leave a few weeks earlier than they were technically supposed to.)

 The food was terrible but the company was terrific.  We will miss Virginia and all the good times we had there.

But let's back up a little bit: earlier that day, we loaded our 24' truck:

No one from Church showed up, but thankfully some fellow interns turned out to help us load.  They were lifesavers.  (this is probably around the time Garrett's feet started going numb... more on that later):

The nearly-empty apartment.

Early Friday morning, we drove to Rob & Haley's house where we had parked the truck overnight.  We said our goodbyes and headed South.

Funny story: We were all headed South (Rob & Haley moved to South Carolina), but we didn't caravan this time because they had already moved their belongings into their new house, so they didn't need to drive as slowly as we did with our truck.  But, we did see them again about 2 hours later at a random gas station - small world.  And, we saw them about an hour or two after that when they passed us on 95.

 The girls on the trip.  Abby was using the towel as a blanket because I was blasting the A/C to stay awake.

 My view for the whole trip - following Garrett.

We drove about 8.5 hours on Friday, stopping in Savannah for the night.  On Saturday we left around 11 and got to the house around 3 (it took an extra hour with the truck).

Thankfully, the girls had this in the backyard to keep them occupied.  Isn't it great?  It was at the house before we bought it and we wrote it into our contract, and they love it.

Unpacking has been slow, to say the least.  Around the time we started loading our truck in Virginia, Garrett's feet started going numb, despite the fact that he was taking it pretty easy. (Garrett has 2 bulging discs in his back, which he's had for over 10 years now. While we were moving, he must have done something to pinch a nerve in his back, thus making his feet go numb, and sometimes give them a burning sensation).  The whole thing was pretty scary, so after we arrived here, he took it easy and didn't lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk, hoping it would go away on it's own.  Obviously, this put all the responsibility of unpacking on me, so it went pretty slowly.

Or, I should say, it's going rather slowly.  I'm certainly not done.  The living room isn't really set up how I'd like it to stay, and Garrett and I are still sleeping on our mattress on the floor.  There are still boxes to unpack (no office boxes have been unpacked so it's half toys strewn about and half boxes).  I still feel like we are living in chaos.  But I have managed to do a few one-person things like mowing the lawn, setting up shelves in the garage, etc.

But it's okay, because we have a long time to make this place "ours" and I'd rather do it slowly in a way that I like, rather than quickly getting everything done and not liking the end result very much.  Ideally, I'd like to paint most of the rooms before we really set things up anyway, but I'm not sure when that will happen.

And thankfully, Garrett is starting to feel better.   He was able to get an MRI, and the damage wasn't as bad as he thought it would be.  We went to Savannah for the 4th of July weekend and he was finally starting to be able to do things again.

I will say this, though: I can probably pretty safely say that this was the last time we will EVER move by ourselves.  Garrett's fine driving a truck, but it's only about $150 to hire a couple people here to load/unload your moving truck, which is well worth it to Garrett.  The last few weeks have been pretty scary, thinking about back surgery and other lingering back issues, etc.  And although there are usually friends to help load/unload trucks, it's always hard to expect people to come help and then not be able to do anything yourself.  We'll see when the time comes, I guess.

And finally, a few more pictures:

We got 2 kittens:

But that didn't really work out so we took them back and got two puppies:

The girls "helped" me set up Abby's bed.  I love this bed - I grew up with it and it's solid wood (I painted it black a few years ago).  It's really easy to set up, too.

And a few other random thoughts:

-There are lots of roaches here.  Roaches terrify me.

-Last night I had a dream about alligators attacking (I was at book club last night and one girl talked about almost hitting a HUGE alligator that was in the middle of the road one night).  I woke up terrified and couldn't get back to sleep for an hour.  Alligators terrify me, too.