Sweet Home Alabama

Alyson and I are now in warm, sunny Andalusia, Alabama visiting my family. It is our first stop on our new life. The trip down was crazy. The day we were supposed to move was forecasted to have a terrible blizzard in Nebraska. The snow and cold rain would have made packing and moving miserable. We had two options:

1.) Wait out the blizzard and get a late start.
or 2.) Take what we can and get out early.

We decided on option 2. Early Saturday morning I woke up from my sleeping bag on the floor and went to pick up the U-Haul trailer. The sky was dark and cloudy with winds of 30-40 mph. Not a good day to move, but it was all the time we had. We were going to have to race the weather. The graphic blog “Escape in the Night” I posted previously is based on this quick move. We were trying to sneak out of the midwest before the blizzard caught us.

The U-Haul trailer was small. Only 4′x8′x 4′, but we packed every inch full. We had planned on taking all day Saturday to load the trailer, clean the apartment and take care of some other miscellaneous errands. Somethings never work out the way you plan though, so we had to improvise. Luckily our plans are very flexible now. While Alyson cleaned the apartment and threw away everything that wasn’t worth keeping, I single handedly loaded the U-Haul. Not such an easy task since we live on the 3rd floor of an apartment building with no elevator, automatically locking doors and the closest parking spot for the trailer was 40 feet from the front door. Not to mention the terrible weather. It wasn’t easy, but I guess the excitement of racing against the storm got me through it.

Our friend Azusa came over a little later that day to help. She was the first friend we made in Lincoln, and I think we will miss her the most. She made us some snacks to eat on the road. Azusa is a real sweet heart.

Around 1:30 that afternoon we finally finished. We said our goodbye’s with Azusa, and hit the road. The weather was coming any minute and we needed to get out quick.

Originally we had wanted to make the 1000 mile trip very slowly and stop to see some tourist trap attractions on the way down. The weather really rushed us out so we didn’t get a chance to do all the things we had wanted. We had nearly every kind of weather on our trip. We got out of Lincoln just before the snow. In Nebraska City, we had hail and tornado warnings. It rained on the long drive across Missouri, and extreme winds across the plains of Arkansas. The drive through Mississippi was warm and sunny, and later we had thick fog on a humid Alabama night.

We only made two stops on the trip down. We stayed overnight in Columbia, Missouri and ate our dinner of Onigiri that Azusa had made for us. Thanks again, Azusa.

And we also stopped in Tupelo, Mississippi to have dinner and see Elvis’s birthplace. Its definitely good to be back in the South. I’ve missed the warm weather and all the green and blue landscape. We will be here for a couple of weeks, and then its on to New Orleans.