Getting out of the house wasn’t easy. Once our awesome loading crew was done efficiently tetris-ing all five of our Door-To-Door crates, we had almost another crate’s worth of stuff that didn’t fit. Almost all of our chairs and most of our kitchen equipment. If we’d known we’d come up short, we would have planned it out a bit better, culling some non-immediate need items from the original pack-in. We ended up trucking all the leftover stuff to a friend’s garage with plans to figure it out later. Maybe we can pay someone to tow a U-Haul trailer up sometime in the next 45 days.

Our landlords were planning to come by on the 31st for a walkthrough, and we were leaving the 29th. I left a several messages for them, letting them know, but never got a return call. Hopefully that won’t cost us our deposit.

We had some fond goodbyes from friends and family at a dessert reception late Monday night. A couple of them brought books we’d loaned out and never thought we’d see again. Others brought some great music for the road. I’d thought about posting the titles of books we missed (not those merely missing) in hopes that they might find their ways home, but it didn’t end up being as important as being able to close the front door of our house on Monte Vista for the last time.

It feels good to be on the road. Our first leg was only a couple of hours long, and ended in La Quinta, where the temperature was 108 degrees. We spent the night there, exhausted, and took a much needed swim in the morning before heading to Arizona. I’m writing this while going north on Highway 17 from Camp Verde, where we stayed the night, to Flagstaff. We plan to make Albuquerque by 5pm. We spent about 40 minutes this morning at Montezuma’s Castle, some 800-year old cliff dwellings built by the Sinagua indians. The boys thought that was very cool. There’s a big difference between dragging your kids through some cultural exhibit and having them try and keep their voices down because they are so involved in what they are seeing/reading.

I think most of the pictures we take will be posted on E’s blog here. Our family has some strict policies about whose computer we download our digital pictures onto, and it’s not the one that I typically blog from.