Indiana, our fifth state!

We are an hour from our hotel tonight and are in the fifth and final state of the evening (NC, VA, WV, OH, IN).  Finally, MG is driving! :). We are all holding up pretty well but I think we are ready to end our second longest driving day of the trip.
We had a great lunch in downtown Charleston, WV.  Glad we stopped and real happy with the meal, but I wasn't impressed with the city.  Other notes of the day:
Rural Ohio is a lot like Eastern NC, flat & farmland.
Audiobooks are a good distraction on long trips
WV countryside is beautiful

More later but a special thank you to MG's mom, Heather, Dennis & Avigail, and Josh & Kristi for providing us gas cards, which will be enough to get us to Indy!!

More later!

Hold your breath, you can do it...

i said to myself as i pushed down on on jared's leg to make the car go faster. we were playing the childhood game of holding your breath as you go through a tunnel and we both suceeded... twice. i remember these tunnels from the yearly christmas trips my mom, two sisters and i took to indiana. the mountains are just so beautiful; even with the rain and drizzle and ghostly fog that settles in the valleys. i am jealous of anyone who was able to drive through while the leaves were still on the trees; bright oranges, yellows and reds.

after a few podcasts that didn't hit the mark, a little basketball and some laughs over my anxiety about j racing up the moutain in this poor, suitcase laden kia, we grabbed some coffe and a rentable audio book from craker barrel.

we're almost halfway to indy and about 10€ percent of our trip to portland is complete! blixen is chilling behind me and loving the view of the mountains in her elevated position, atop a suitcase, comforter and doggy bed.

ps- the website doesn't register my blackbery's upper case command... i know, i know, who owns a blackberry now a days anyway? :)

To High Point... and beyond!!!

Apartments were cleaned, keys were returned in Raleigh and Chapel Hill yesterday, boxes were packed, and a car was stuffed full.  We got on the road around 7pm yesterday and Mary Grace was very concerned about the car sitting too low.  MG wasn't the only female concerned.  For the last hour or two of time in Raleigh, Blixen was afraid we were going to leave her.  She would run (run is a relative term when dealing with Blixen) outside every time the door opened and would sit next to the car to make sure we didn't forget about her.  However, we made it to High Point without incident. 

A special thanks goes out to William Delbert Craft, III for taking me and my 142lb box to UPS yesterday.  The box would not fit in Mary Grace's car and it had everything I am bringing to Portland that wasn't going in the car.  I just about lost it when it wouldn't get in MG's car.  Still, it barely fit under UPS' 150lb weight limit, so I consider it karma that it worked. 

We are about to pack up and will be leaving High Point for Indianapolis within the hour.  Stay tune for more updates (some posts will be rather short, those will likely be the mobile updates we make).