Adventure on the High Seas...

...or the desert, whatever.

Guess who's back online! After having an incredible time with Josh, we loaded up the moving truck and spent the last three days driving down to Arizona and we are now officially here. We are in Arizona. Can you believe it? I'm pretty sure I can't. I think I'm still in a surreal state of mind. Somehow, I really don't comprehend the changes that we are experiencing and about to.

Here's the skinny on what we've been doing...

While Josh was in Montana we had some fun. We finished packing the house and garage, we took the kids mini-golfing, we had a chick-flick moment in the airport when he first arrived. It was really nice to have my husband with me again. I didn't even mind sleeping in a double bed with him (a double is a bit small for the two of us).

Josh left on Thursday, so I spent that afternoon doing things around Mom and Dad's house. Friday Dad and I went to pick up the moving truck in Helena, which is about an hour and a half away from Great Falls. Then more packing. See, the kids and I moved into my parents' house the day Josh first left for Arizona. So, for several weeks our daily-use things intermingled in Mom and Dad's stuff, so I had additional packing to do to separate our items. This was the hardest thing of the whole packing process. I worked it Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Ugh. So much packing!! Frustrating!!

Saturday we spent loading our moving truck with some wonderful friends. It was nice to have that part done, but I was still getting all our stuff at Mom and Dad's. Finally, everything was packed (although I got virtually no cleaning done at Mom and Dad's. I feel really bad about that).

Monday morning we took off. Dad drove the moving truck and I drove our van. We also were able to take my friend Emily and two of her boys to visit her folks in Utah. We stopped in Logan for a second to drop some maternity clothes off to my sister-in-law. Then we rushed off to stay the night with my friend Cindy. What usually takes an average of 9 hours to drive, ended up being a 13 hour trip. It was a monster of a drive. The good part was having the nice company of Emily and her boys. The bad part was that the day was so looooong!! We had a good visit with Cindy, much better than in July when we stopped by for just a few hours. Sorry to all my friends we didn't get to visit. I wish we had had more time to spend with everyone. We'll have to do a big BBQ sometime.

Tuesday we drove the rest of the way through Utah. We stopped in Kanab, which happened to be where we met up with Josh. We stayed at a hotel that was used years ago when several Hollywood actors stayed in Kanab while filming different movies. The members of the Rat Pack stayed there. In fact, Frank Sinatra's wife, Eva Gardner, stayed with him. When her mother wanted to come stay, he didn't want the hotel to go out of their way to accommodate her, so he suggested they turn a closet into a single room for her. Today it's called the "Mother-in-law". As we got there and checked in, we got two of the last three rooms available. Josh, the kids, and I stayed in the "Anne Baxter" room. Dad got the "Mother-in-law". We all got a kick out of that.

Wednesday (yesterday) we finished our trip and got to Tara and Jabon's house in the late afternoon. We spent today unloading the moving truck (thanks to Josh's cousin's husband, his brother, and some guys from our new ward) and then turned the truck back in. Whew, one hurdle done.

Tomorrow I'll go get the kids into school. Next week they have two half days and then the week after that they will be on Fall Recess, so they'll have no school at all. This, plus the fact that the schools here started at the beginning of August, I'm afraid the kids are going to be a bit behind. We'll see.

And to try to put me into reality, here it is my second night in Arizona and I'm already sleeping alone. Josh went back to work tonight. Maybe we'll get some sort of routine soon. That will be helpful for me to wrap my mind around this whole new adventure.