Moving Part III: Gone to Carolina

We're home!! New home, that is. Home sweet North Carolina.

I am very relieved thankful grateful happy to report that the moving truck made it from CA to NC with all our things mostly intact.

We had a small number of broken items... mostly fixable and nothing to cry over, though we will be reporting the broken items to the moving company. There was also some frustration over the timing of the truck's arrival. They had originally told us the truck would arrive on a Monday... and then that got changed to Friday... and it actually arrived on Saturday. Plus it was difficult to get in touch with the company because they were so slow in responding to calls and emails. I get the sense that this is all typical of cross-country movers, unfortunately. But I am brushin' that dirt off my shoulders because what's important is that we made it!

Unpacking has been almost-but-not-quite as horrible as packing was. Man, it is hard to get ANYTHING done around here with these BABIES all over us!! LOL. And although we made an effort to organize things by room when we were packing, things did not end up perfectly sorted... As my friend Jaime put it, "At first everything's all neat and organized... and by the end you're just, like, throwing everything in random boxes!" She nailed it.

We also kept running into roadblocks because of lack of storage furniture. We chose not to pack most of our shelves and storage units because we wanted different ones, but you can't unpack books if you don't have a bookshelf and you can't unpack clothes if you don't have a dresser!!

Slowly, painfully, in halting, partially completed steps, we have managed to accomplish most of the unpacking. The truck unloaded on Saturday night a week ago and sometime around last Wednesday it started to feel like an actual home instead of some kind of homegoods warehouse explosion.

My parents came up for a couple of days to help out while we are getting unpacked and organized. It's so nice that they are just a drive away! (A long drive, but not longer than a day of flying cross-country!)

James is starting work this week. We visited his new lab at Duke a few days ago and met some of his coworkers. Hoping all goes well for him as he starts work!

I am so ready to be *totally done* unpacking and organizing, but I am trying to let myself start to feel settled, even with all our books still in boxes and missing furniture that needs to be bought or built. Some things can wait until January!

Moving Part II: Made it Across the Country

We knew that it would take the movers a couple of weeks to get our furniture and boxes from one coast to the other, so we timed the move so that we could spend the in-between time in Georgia during Thanksgiving week.

We landed in Atlanta after an eventful, but thankfully safe travel day - there was a bomb threat on the flight before ours, a marriage proposal over the intercom on our first flight, snow in Denver and terrifying turbulence on our second flight, and then our luggage got jammed on its way to the baggage claim carousel at Hartsfield-Jackson! Plus, poor Henry had a hard time falling asleep on our second flight and he cried for something like an hour, which felt like an eternity!

The next morning, as we drove through metro Atlanta to visit some friends, I looked out the window at a very different landscape and felt, we're not in California anymore! It didn't feel sad. It felt like a huge sense of relief. We had made it this far. We had made it safely to the southeast. Not quite to our final destination, but still all the way across the country. It was a lot of work in a short amount of time to get us moved out of California after James got the job offer from Duke, but we did it and I was proud of us for it and grateful to have made it safely.

During our first few days in Georgia we spent some time with old friends, with Granny and Danpa, and we upgraded our family car to a fancy new minivan!

We spent Thanksgiving and the following weekend up in the North Georgia mountains with James' family. It was a full house: lots of people and lots of food! 

It has been a long time since we were in town for Thanksgiving with James' family. It was great to get to spend the holiday weekend with his siblings and all the kids. It will be so nice to be able to drive down for more family holidays like this!

After Thanksgiving weekend, we still had about a week to wait for the moving truck to make it to our new house. So after leaving my in-laws' home, we headed north, slowly making our way closer to our final destination, and have been staying with James' brother in South Carolina. 

The latest from the moving company is that our truck will arrive this weekend! So very soon we will be headed at last to our new home! It has been a nice break. Feels like we've been on vacation for two weeks. I'm excited and a little nervous to finally get to our house and start getting settled. There will be a lot to do... some furniture and appliances to buy, all the unpacking, and it's almost Christmas! I think the first thing I'll unpack will be the Christmas decorations... :)