Moving Days (Aug 9 - Sep 2)

We worked like crazy to load the Pod, trailer and van. The girls were so good and helped clean out the garage. I would pick up one thing after another, hand it to one of the girls and say "Pod", "trailer" or "trash" and they would put the thing wherever it belonged. They helped so much! By evening we ran out of room so Paul gave away a lot of things that would not fit to our neighbors the Chinapens and Kahlids. We pulled out of the drive about 8:30 p.m. with friends waving goodbye.

Drove all night to Tennessee and looked for a few days at houses with our realtor Sonja Scales. She was super nice and helpful. Erilynn kept referring to her as "my friend". Tried to start working remotely on Monday, but could not get my computer to recognize my work's internal computers. Tried a different hotel and even at Sonja's place, but had no luck. So, we hopped in the van and drove all the way down to Texas over night. We got there in the morning and I was able to start work from Glenn and Margie's house. Thank the Lord!

We stayed there a couple days, then went to try to work at the Berry's. Could not get a connection through their satellite hookup, so we stayed the weekend and drove back to Glenn and Margie's. Spent about a week and a half there working and buying our new house that we found in Tennessee. It was extremely stressing.

We scheduled to close on the 31st of August, so I stopped work at 1600 on Wednesday and we drove all night back to Tennessee. At about 2300 on a deserted stretch of highway, in the middle of Arkansas, our rear van tire blew. I spent about an hour putting on the spare, with tractor trailer trucks wizzing by about 2 feet from my head. The wind from them would buffet the van and trailer, making them rock (the children slept through it all). All that and the tire turned out to be almost flat!!! We were pulling our small trailer absolutely loaded, which made it even harder. We drove on the side of the road for about 2 miles, pulled off on the first exit and found a gas station with an air pump! We thanked God for hearing our prayers.

We were praying the whole time from then on that the spare tire would make it all the way to TN. We were supposed to do an inspection of our house at 830 and we got there at 833. The closing went pretty smoothly, except I kept falling asleep. We were so happy to get into our new house. It is awesome. My dad and brother John and his wife Amanda came and helped us unload the pod over the weekend. Oww, my back!