A journey of 2419 Miles...

As most readers know...the time has finally arrived. Our belongings have finally been sorted, organized, and lovingly packed into approximately 45 boxes of various sizes and shapes. Then those boxes, along with our humble array of furniture, have been successfully packed into 7 feet of a shipping container. And now, that container is on its long journey to Langley, where it will meet us in approx. 7 days.

The goodbyes have been said, our little Taurus packed...and we're on our way. It was hard to leave, very hard, but as we climbed into the car and waved our final goodbyes, I found great comfort in the knowledge that we were accompanied on our journey by the love, hope and blessings of our incredibly supportive family and friends.

The first half of our journey has gone ridiculously smoothly. The weather and traffic on the way to Chicago was stellar. We left Rockford around 3 on Tuesday, plugged our friend Chris's Chicago address into our trusty GPS, and arrived safely in Bloomfield, Chicago by 6:30.

Unfortunately, about an hour into our trip, when we tried to diligently photograph our journey as promised, we discovered that our camera battery was dead. Completely dead. And the charger had been diligently packed away in a box in our shipping crate. It's a very frustrating feeling to know exactly where the thing you need is (in box 19 I believe, labeled as "Camera Cords and books) but also knowing there's nothing you can do about it. So far, we've bombed this whole taking pictures thing, what between this and our honeymoon. I always have these notions that "oh, I should take a pictures of all of our boxes mid-packing" or "I should photograph this project step-by-step", but unfortunately when I'm actually doing something, pausing to grab a camera and snap some photos isn't in my nature. I guess I'm just not the photo taking type. Maybe that should be part of a new years resolution. Anyway,  I guess if having no camera battery is the worse thing that's happened on our trip, we're pretty lucky. We did try, though! We ended up with some extra time in Chicago, so we decided to stop at a Best Buy.  There, we toyed around with the idea of buying a battery charger, and were even tempted to just buy a new camera, but frugality and rationality won over those ideas and we decided to just go photo-less until Wyoming. So this post, which I'd originally anticipated being full of photos of us and awesome scenery, will instead be words words words. My apologies :(

Anyway, we stayed with Jared's old roommate Chris in Chicago. We enjoyed the opportunity to visit him and see his little Chicago apartment. Unfortunately, we also spent a restless night listening to the three trains zoom past his little Chicago apartment :) So when 6:00 rolled around on Wednesday morning, we were awake and ready to go, right on schedule! Our goal was to reach Sheridan, Wyoming by that evening so that we could see Jared's sister-in-law Alycia, who was leaving for a conference the next morning at 6.

Our GPS navigated us through the Chicago traffic smoothly, and we then traveled trough Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota on the way to Wyoming. We enjoyed seeing the rocky structures in Wisconsin near the dells, and saw tons of really pretty barns and farms. Wisconsin was much cooler than we had anticipated. I took over driving somewhere near Minnesota, and we were in awe as we crossed over the Mississippi and saw unexpected mini-mountains and some frozen waterfalls. But we drove out of that landscape really quickly, and it was pretty much flat land from that point on.

Anyone who's traveled down I-90 probably can remember seeing the exact same things we did--all the signs for Wall-Drug (it was closed by the time we got there!), the corn palace advertisements (that was tempting), and at one point I was surprised to see some strange old-west sculptures scattered throughout a field, including this one:

I found this photo online, it was a pretty simple search to find it. Apparently I'm not the only one who's somewhat baffled as to how a dinosaur fits into the old west theme :)  It was pretty entertaining, and I actually find the rolling, empty fields in South Dakota very peaceful. We saw what seemed like two hours of a spectacular sunset. Sometimes, I think God gives us flat, clear lands like these to remind us of the glory of his skies. It was beautiful. Unfortunately, once the sun had set, it got dark very soon, and was pitch black by the time we reached the badlands. It was kind of frustrating looking into the darkness and knowing that something interesting was out there, but not being able to see it.

We safely reached Jared's brother Brandon and his wife Alycia's house in Sheridan by 10:05, right on schedule. We got to peek at our nephew Parker briefly last night, wrapped up tight like a burrito sleeping in his crib, and this morning we're anxiously awaiting his return from day care for a proper visit. We're excited to experience all that Sheridan has to offer over the next couple days. Right now, we're anticipating leaving on Tuesday or Wednesday, and are really looking forward to taking the next half of our journey slow. It's actually quite overwhelming to try to consider all of the country we've covered so far!

So with that, we send you lots of love from Wyoming!