February 27, 2011

The time finally arrived to begin the move out to the Midwest.  And it seemed appropriate to provide a travel log of our trip.  We tried to snap photos of our entry into each state along the way (unfortunately, due to some inattention on our part we sailed right by the the very last one - WI - even though that is where we were landing up).  For the start, you can see we got our Camry fully loaded and Jo all ready start her adventure in Milwaukee.  Our first stop was in Hartford to drop off a car for my return on Sunday since I'm still in CT for a few months.  After that we had pretty smooth sailing all the way to Scranton, PA after which Mother Nature decided she would need to add some adventure to our trip.  A large storm was our companion from there until Toledo, Ohio.  The first day was simply rain which while making driving a wee bit more challenging isn't that hard to deal with. 

We stopped for the night in Clarion, PA to get a good night's rest to tackle the second leg of the journey.  Oh what a mistake.  We should have kept driving all the way through Ohio since by the time we woke up and got started the next day the rain had switched over to snow.  We drove for 4 hours through everything from flurries to blizzard conditions, sometimes creeping along at 30 miles an hour following the truck in front of us. 

But by the time we hit Toledo, the sun broke through the clouds and it was smooth sailing the rest of the way.  We learned along with the way that this is a really big country since we only traversed one-third of it and covered all of 7 states.  But we had a great time catching up on back episodes of "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" podcasts (you can download them at NPR and a special thanks to Sheri and Bruno for hooking us on them), talking about the next chapter in our life, and realizing we both deal with driving in the snow stress differently (yes, I get snippy while Jo just kind of freaks out a little).  Oh and we also realized why we usually fly everywhere - this is a really big country and driving across it takes a long time.

But Jo is settled in her new temporary home and we have stocked the kitchen with enough food for a small village.  She starts her new job on Tuesday and she is looking forward/kind of nervous about getting that underway.  I have my last week at Pfizer coming up and then after that, who knows.....happy retirement?

On our photo montage, we determined it actually hard to take a picture of an object from a speeding car (remember some of these were taken at speeds of 65 mph, or possibly greater) with a digital, self-focusing camera.  So sorry for the picture quality and the fact that you can't actually read many of the signs - trust us they are the states we drove through.