Dominica and I were exhausted when we woke up today. There is so much to do yet and so much driving that has to be done. It is overwhelming just to think about it. We have no choice but to leave today or else we will be unable to make it for Christmas Eve in League City so one way or another we are done with the packing today and the house remains in whatever state it is in when we decide that we absolutely have to leave. This is going to be awful, one way or another.
We packed and cleaned like crazy all day. So much to do. We got one or two BMW loads done and out to the storage unit before we did the final packing of the BMW for the trip out. An even bigger job was to pack the car top carrier which we have never even been able to test before because we have not had the car available to us since we got the carrier last week!
My biggest task for the day was cleaning up the unbelievable quantity of CAT5 and CAT6 cables strewn through the basement. What a job that was. Maybe even an hour of work all on its own.
We finally reached a stage where we felt that we could leave Peekskill at four in the afternoon. Four o’clock! Almost exactly an entire day late. Now, after nine hours of crazed cleaning and packing we have to drive more than sixteen hundred miles down to Houston. This is going to be insane. We hadn’t even eaten a bite before leaving either – there just was not enough time.
We were on the road and on our way to our new life in Texas. We were starving too and decided to stop at the Burger King on the Garden State Parkway near the NY/NJ border to get some food. We stopped there and ate quickly. Unfortunately because we left so late we got stuck in the NYC rush hour in North Jersey. We lost almost two hours sitting in practically stopped traffic just getting through the Newark area! What a horrible way to start our really long drive. This is not boding well at all.
Once we finally got past the Delaware Water Gap traffic started moving just fine and we were able to really get moving. We made a quick pitstop at Barnes & Nobles in Pennsylvania to pick up some books on CD so that we would have something to which to listen in the car. We got Sue Grafton’s latest release “U is for Undertow” as well as the Janet Evanovich’s “Plum Lucky” which is much shorter. Our total drive is almost thirty hours of car time so we need quite a bit to listen to potentially.
We decided that the delay in New Jersey was so significant that it pushed us back to the point where we could not make it to our hotel in Birmingham, Alabama before we would need to check out in the morning. So we called and canceled our reservation. Crappy. Now we have no choice but to drive straight through the entire way. This is now officially awful.
It was extremely cold for all of the drive that we did today. About thirty degrees in Peekskill dipping into the mid-twenties in Virginia. Today was all driving by me. Dominica stayed awake pretty much the entire time and we only just began listening to “U is for Undertow.” It is looking like it is going to last us the entire trip.
The beginning of the drive was pretty bad but we made good time for the rest of the day. Liesl and Oreo are both doing great, just sleeping away. No issues at all.
All of our Twitter posts ceased around seven this evening as global Blackberry service is offline. So no updates for a while even though we were writing them and attempting to post.