Friday, March 7, 2014

Moving to New York

We decided that since we have now moved across the country we should keep a blog to help us stay in contact with family and friends. Hopefully, we will be good at keeping it up to date!

Our trip out here was quite an adventure. Saturday morning we headed out through the canyon to Bear Lake area. About half way through the canyon we started debating turning around and taking highway 70 instead of 80. It was snowing, a lot. We finally made it through to Garden City, but most of Wyoming proved to be about the same. Luckily, Jared did really well with driving and we were perfectly safe! Hurray!

Our first stop was in Kearney, Nebraska. We slept well, had a good breakfast, and when we went to start the car in the morning the battery was dead. We had known our battery wasn't the best, but the negative degree weather that night proved to be too much. Luckily, one of the hotel workers had some jumper cables and came to our rescue. 

We were then able to find a sacrament meeting to attend in Council Bluffs, Iowa. It was about 2 hours away from where we stayed the night and was a really good break and opportunity for us. 

That night we stopped in Joliet, Illinois and it was already negative degree weather when we got there. Consequently, we decided we needed to get some jumper cables. When looking at them we decided to go with a power on board type thing so we could jump our car ourselves. We had a feeling this was going to be a reoccurring issue and we were right! Since we left there have been two mornings that we have not had to jump the battery. We were very blessed to be able to be able to jump it ourselves. 

We decided to spend the next night in Buffalo, New York the next night. It was my birthday and Jared wanted us to be able to relax so we didn't go quite as far. We had a nice dinner and relaxed. 

The next day we arrived in Saratoga Springs, New York. We came to our apartment, unloaded some stuff, and then went and found a hotel. The moving truck wasn't here yet and we decided we would like to sleep in a real bed and get free breakfast.

We spent the next couple days exploring the area, cleaning the apartment, looking at furniture, and all kinds of other things. It's been interesting to see how much the little things with moving add up financially. GE is paying for the actual move, hotels, and food; but we are paying for everything with the apartment. It is a really nice apartment and there is more room than we have ever had in an apartment, including a second bathroom. We now need to figure out how to lay everything out and what other furniture and bathroom supplied we will be needing. The other day we also realized there are no ceiling lights in the living room or bedrooms so we will be buying lamps. Also, while we were driving here we noticed one of our tires was kind of wobbly. We took it in yesterday and had to get a new tire, an oil change, and should have gotten our battery changed. Slowly, but surely we will have the stuff we need and plenty that we don't need, I'm sure. 

After staying in the hotel for a few days, last night we found out the moving truck has been delayed. It will be here sometime between Monday and Wednesday next week. We decided we wanted to go ahead and go to our new place instead of the hotel anyway. We have an air mattress we can sleep on and we can buy a cheap pot to cook in for now. 

Correction! We HAD an air mattress to sleep on. We came to the apartment, unloaded the rest of our stuff, went to fill up the air mattress, and there is a huge hole that we probably can't patch. Consequently, we are sitting on our awesome new carpet in our awesome new apartment while Jared looks at sporting stores that sell air mattresses on his awesome new iPad, and I am writing this on our awesome laptop!