And away we go!

I didn't really sleep Sunday night. I was too excited and nervous and I knew there was more packing to be done. Here's how the pile looked at 1am when cousin Michelle and I went to bed.

I sat up at 3am and wrote notes to myself.... and I jumped out of bed at 7, before the alarm had a chance to go off. I sent dad to the Uhaul place to get more boxes before he came over. Mom came over and fretted and paced and made noise about how much was left to be done, and how I shouldn't say anything about Bryan's last minute packing. HA! I nearly fell over. So after a while of that, she had to leave. At least she was wonderful enough to stop at Starbucks on the way over to bring me some iced tea. :)

I looked out the window and saw the moving truck at 9:45am, but then it didn't pull into the driveway... so I ran down the street and found them in the other driveway, and had them come back. They managed to park right in front and open the ramp from the truck right to the stairs. They officially started at 10am, and were done at 1pm. The lead guy, Delaware (yes, that's his name) was great. But he didn't do much lifting, he had two other guys to do that. One of them(Victor, the French guy) had a long cotton strap that he used to tie the boxes to his back. Ingenious... except my cousin kept calling it his "strap-on." heh.

While they were finishing the move, Michelle started packing the car. She's very good at packing things in an organized fashion. We can't see out the rear window when we drive, but everything fits!! I have no idea where some of the stuff is, I just know I threw stuff in bags to make sure it came with us. ;)

So, after getting rid of the bookcases and the desk at the dumpster, round about 2:30pm, we piled ourselves into the car, cranked up the A/C (it was 94 degrees) and drove away. We made it as far as Fair Lakes and stopped for lunch at Wendy's. It took an hour to get out 66 to 81, but basically we've been flying along ever since!

Yesterday we began to discover that Virginia and Tennessee have lots of funky-named State Parks -- Hungry Mother State Park, Frozen Head State Park... and interesting town names. (And many town names in common with other places, like Carlisle, Emory, Morristown, etc.) Along the way, Michelle made friends with the guys from the volunteer fire department of Staunton (VA), who followed or rode next to us for quite a few miles.

Snacking in the car is hard, even when you're not driving. I managed to dump the crumbs from my granola bar package all down my shirt. I was still finding granola bits in my bra hours later. UGH. In my own defense, I was REALLY tired.

After dinner at Ruby Tuesday's and a quick visit to a deserted outlet mall, we crossed into Tennessee at 11:15pm! (we had to pull over to take a pic of the sign)

At 11:45, we were in our hotel room in Knoxville(thanks, Joan, for the discount!) and in 10 minutes we were basically dead asleep. From Lee Hwy in Arlington, we had put 480 miles on the odometer.

Day 2 report, coming tomorrow, including crossing into the Central Time Zone, a winery, more outlets, and Michelle hitting her head on the car window. But right now, I'm too tired.

and thank you to all the random people who keep calling my cell phone to make sure we're ok. :)