Our 3000 mile adventure

Well, luckily I took notes while on our trip that was err...2 months ago.

Please remember, I had minor surgery Monday, Thursday we went to see my doctor for a post op check up, picked up our U-Haul, bribed our friends to come over Thursday night with free beer, food, and stuff, if they would help pack up the U-Haul, then Friday morning, we were on the road.  So I was still recovering and pretty uncomfortable for the first 2000 miles of the trip.  I'm a lucky girl though and have a great boyfriend who drove just about the entire trip, dealt with my post surgery nastiness, and whining.  

Friday Cody and Chris came over to help us pack up the last of our things.  Stupid boys kept making me laugh, which was extremely painful AND we kept catching Ruckus with his face in the treat box which was also causing me pain.  We drove ALL day Friday and didn't make it out of Alaska.  Texas, you're actually not so big.  The drive through AK was pretty spectacular.  Just north of Palmer is so beautiful.  

Way north of Palmer the roads have tons of frost heaves which kills the beauty.  I was so ready to stop by the time we got to Tok, all the ups and downs and bumps from the heaves were causing me some pretty serious discomfort.

We had planned on camping the whole trip, which would have cost us $200 MAX the whole trip, but because I could barely get myself out of a BED, there was no way I was going to be getting up off the cold ground, so we hoteled it.  The whole way.  Not quite the $200 we were hoping for...

Saturday we left Tok nice and early to get into Canada and feel like we were actually getting somewhere on this trip.  Ruckus managed to get his head stuck in his treat box and dumped treats all over the backseat.  More pain.  We finally made it into "No man's land" the strip where you are no longer in the US but have about 20 miles to go until you make it to the Canadian border.  WTF is that area?  

We spent a lot of the day on gravely roads in road construction for the frost heaves. Hit some beautiful spots overlooking a lake, finally saw a brown bear past Haines Junction (where the Canadian cupcake is)

We ended up staying in a hiccup of a town called Teslin Saturday night.  It was literally a town that had 2 motels/gas stations and that's about all.  We had discussed driving through the night but decided to stop so we could get a good nights sleep.  I ended up only sleeping 3 hours, good thing the olympics were on TV.

 Sunday we decided we were going to shoot through and drive all night and get to Edmonton by the morning. I'm a horrible night driver (not so much anymore now that I have glasses!) so really, it was Dylan who was going to drive all night.  Sunday was the most beautiful part of our drive.  We went through the sign post forest in some town who's name I can't remember and don't feel like looking up.  

We made it through Muncho Provicial Park (I drove!) and it was SOOO hilly and curvy but so incredibly beautiful.  

We saw lots of buffalo, some baby mountain goats and I had a baby caribou run right out in front of the car while I was driving.  Yikes!  

We were able to get Ruckus out of the car for awhile and let him go swimming in the lake, which he really needed.  The water was so crystal clear and not really even that cold, I was wanting to go swimming as well.  

Just past Muncho Park everything turned really green and beautiful hills and farm land.  I cranked up the country music, put the windows down, and was missing Illinois.  (Dylan was asleep, that's why I was aloud to turn up the country music...) 

(not quite where I was missing IL, but close)

Along the way gas stations closed about 10pm, but we made it to all of those stations before they closed so we were able to reach our goal of driving through the night.

We arrived in Edmonton around 8am Monday morning (thanks for driving Dylan!) We quickly found a hotel that would let us check in so early and accepted pets and went straight to our room and passed out until noon.  We then went and checked out the Edmonton Mall.  The mall was really cool, but would have been way cooler if we could have enjoyed the water park and amusement park.  (damn you appendix!!) 

 I got tired from walking around so much pretty quickly (I think it was from carrying my purse and I'm not the kind of girl to let my man carry my PURSE for me.)  So we went back to the hotel room and spent the rest of the day relaxing, watching the Olympics, and wishing we were in Idaho already.

Tuesday morning we got up super early, found there were no gas stations open anywhere nearby, got on the road anyway, almost ran out of gas, finally used our emergency gas, made it to a town just South of Edmonton and was finally able to fill up.  Phew, close one.  

Edmonton to Calgary wasn't very exciting.  Actually, Calgary to the US wasn't that exciting.  We could see some beautiful mountains way off in the distance.  We had talked about making a side trip out to them and decided we couldn't stand to be in the car any extra.

We finally made it back to the US around 2 after stopping just North of the border to get gas.  This was the first place Canadians were overly friendly towards us.  I had 2 people offer to help me pump gas (trust me, I did NOT look cute.) and I had someone asking about our trip so far.  We finally got back into the good ole USA around 2pm, after we thought we were going to be searched.  That didn't happen, luckily.  

Since we couldn't drive through Glacier (due to our trailer) we drove around it (which really couldn't have been much worse than going through...) 

It was really great to go through West Glacier again, it was fun to see some of that again.  I wish we could have gone through the park since I don't remember a lot of it, but we will hopefully get up there for awhile this summer.

(notice Ruckus.  He was taking the rocks out of the lake for us.  Thanks dog.)

We ended up staying in Missoula for the night.  We were finally going to camp but the campground we went to was beyond packed and it was too dark to set up camp in some of the other places, so we had to hunt down a hotel that had vacancy.  APPARENTLY, it was the Montana State fair that week.  Convenient. 

Wednesday we hit the road with Burley on our minds.  We drove and drove and drove and the landscape went from green to... well this: 

and then we drove and drove and drove some more and we FINALLY made it to Burley early afternoon.   

(Ruckus was so excited he couldn't sit in the back any longer)

We got everything unpacked and into our place.  Dylan once again is a wonderful wonderful man, since I was still unable to do any heavy lifting and grew tired very quickly.  We had to spend our first night on the floor of our new home but it didn't matter, we were so tired we could have slept anywhere I think.

So we did it!  We went 3000 miles in less than a week, pulling a trailer, on antibiotics (which I had an awesome reaction to, hello rash in my mouth), with minimal sleep, no major incidents, no accidents, injuries, or illnesses.  We were very lucky.

I can't believe that we have been here for 2 months already and we still have no friends.  WTF.  We are enjoying Burley very much, missing AK and our friends and family all the time.  Dylan found a job the 1st day he applied for one.  He started working the following day.  This relieved so much stress and made it all feel so right being here.  I absolutely love teaching.  It's everything I have dreamed of.  The teachers I work with tell me I'm doing an awesome job, my principal loves me, and I don't feel like I'm drowning.  It just feels good.  Like my life is finally back in my control.

In other news.  We adopted a kitty!  We have been talking about it for almost a year and Dylan always said once we moved back to the US we could get one.  So last weekend I saw this orange kitty looking at me at PetSmart (don't worry, he was a rescue kitty) and it was love.  His name was Clarence when we adopted him but we couldn't keep that one.  So in the car we were picking names and picked Rozzy (after the brand Rossignal, we wanted something that was tied to snowboarding) and the kitty just started meowing and purring when we called him Rozzy.  So it stuck.

Ruckus has been adapting pretty well to the new animal, he is starting to play with Rozzy and I'm not as worried that he's going to eat him anymore.  We have left them home alone for short periods of time and there has been no blood.  Until we are all completely comfortable Rozzy lives in the spare room while Dylan and I are at work and at night.

Looking at my past posts, I have zero comments so I'm wondering if this is still being read by anyone out there.  If you do read it, let me know.  Drop a comment.  Otherwise I may drop this.

Life is good.

P.S.  I didn't proofread this.