Sheep Guarding Llama

I am still pretty sick today.  I got a good deal of sleep last night and my sinuses are definitely improved but still not great.  Brittany has today off of work even though Joe has to work all day so she went over to the Grices’ with Dominica and I.  We were all starving so we decided to swing into Waffle House on the way so that we could get some breakfast.  It turns out that Brittany has never eaten at a Waffle House!

It turns out that she has still not eaten at one as the wait to get in to eat was way too long so we went to Cracker Barrel instead which only had a ten minute wait.  The same Cracker Barrel that we ate at the last time that we were in League City.

After breakfast we were over to the Grices’ where the Carl clan has arrived from Arlington to visit for the day and tomorrow morning.  We hung out at the Grices’ for a while and then Brittany, Madeline, Emily and I ran out to Game Stop and did some shopping.  I picked up a bunch of Nintendo DS games including: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals Echoes of Time, Suikoden, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, a Nancy Drew title and Fire Emblem (the remake of the original.)  It was a good haul.  Brittany had decided to go to Game Stop so that she could stock up on Wii games for her new Wii system that she got for Christmas for which she does not yet have any games except for Wii Sports which comes with the platform.

Not too much news today.  Just spent the day hanging out with the family.  We are all worn out from driving, Christmas, etc.

It’s Christmas!  Today is Liesl’s second Christmas but the first Christmas that she really gets to experience.  Normally the Tocco Christmas is a crazy affair with everyone up early and present opening going all day until we rush to make it to Christmas dinner.  Today, instead, we started opening presents on the late side and were done by one in the afternoon!  Without the adults really needing to exchange presents it cleared a lot of the presents out of the way and eased logistics dramatically.  This moved along really well and was quite manageable.

I was pretty sick today.  My bronchitis is really bad and I have a new sinus infection like I often get.  I was so bad today that I could barely hold my right eye open at all.  I also finished drinking all of the special Chinese pharmaceutical tea that Brian had gotten for me a week ago.  Now I am on my own with normal tea.

It is Christmas Eve.  Quite strange to wake up this morning and realize that, as of today, Dominica, Liesl, Oreo and I are Texans.  After all of the work that we have been doing to get here it is incredible to think that it is mostly over and here we are.  No more New York for us.  At least not for a while. 😉

Believe it or not, we were awake at eight thirty this morning!  I have no idea how we managed to wake up that early.  And that is eight thirty eastern time – we have no adjusted to central time yet.  As of today we live on central time, weird.  This is the first time in my life that I have lived in the “south” or outside of the eastern time zone.

We didn’t get very much sleep last night.  Between the massive thunderstorm that woke us up with crazy wind and rain blowing in the windows or Liesl not being tired in the least after having slept for almost two entire days and Oreo having a really hard time adjusting to the house we got at most six hours of sleep and most likely closer to just four hours.

Francesca came over first thing this morning and picked up Liesl from us.  We are exhausted and Liesl has tons of energy to spare so she went over to the Grices’ for the day to burn a lot of it off.  That worked out perfectly as it gave us time to do some unpacking and relaxing.  I stayed awake after that point but Dominica went back to sleep until about noon when she had to get up and get to work on wrapping presents so that we are ready for the festivities this evening.

We went over to the Grices’ in League City around three thirty this afternoon.  This was our first time to see everyone since arriving in Texas.

At four thirty we went to church for the Christmas Eve Mass.  It was a very nice service but standing room only and quite warm inside of the church while being too cold outside.  The temperature dropped into the forties today!  Quite cold for December in Texas.

Because Joe and Britt need to work tomorrow we are doing the “adult” Christmas celebration this evening.  So the adults exchanged presents today instead.

We were out way later than we should have been.  Dominica and I were really tired by the time that we were heading back to Joe and Britt’s to get some sleep.  It was around midnight when we finally turned in.

I was pretty sick today.  The long drive and lack of sleep (and probably the stress) have been contributing to my inability to fight off sickness and my bronchitis has come back with a vengeance.  So I have not been n the best shape for the day and am likely going to be pretty sick tomorrow.

We are still on the road.  We started today (at midnight, eastern time) in the mountains of western Virginia on Route 81.  Our route is roughly the NY Palisades to the Garden State Parkway to Interstate 78 to Interstate 81 which will take us all of the way to Knoxville, Tennessee.  After today I will have driven every inch of i81 which is a very long north south run from the Canadian border to the deep south with a very long curve along the mountains.

For several hours this morning we had no email or Twitter communications with the outside world because of the Blackberry outage.  BB came back online around three thirty and we started Twittering again.

We entered Tennessee from Virginia at roughly four thirty this morning.  We can’t believe how cold it is here.  We stopped to refuel right over the border and it was thirty one degrees!  There is snow everywhere as well.  We talked to the lady working at the gas station and she said that thousands of people here in Tennessee and north in Virginia were without power and had been for days and might not have power restored until after Christmas.

We were unable to find a bathroom in Tennessee due to the power outage so we went to Perkins which is open all night as Liesl needed to be changed and we could all do with some time out of the car.  Definitely time for a good stretch now that we are twelve hours into the trip.  So we stopped for breakfast.  We were the only people at Perkins when we arrived but when we left the place was full of the contract electrical crews in from out of town helping to get power restored in the area.

Dominica took over for her first turn driving while in Tennessee.  She drove us down to and through Knoxville.  Knoxville is the first real city on this trip that I have never seen previously.  We are now farther on i81 than I have ever been before.

We crossed into Georgia just minutes before ten in the morning.  We are making good time, overall, but are incredibly far behind our original schedule and are nowhere close to Texas at this point.

Once we were in to Alabama the sun was out and the temperatures shot up.  The temperature difference between the Upland South and the Deep South was really noticeable today.  It was gorgeous down in Alabama and we enjoyed great driving conditions.  Sixty six degrees in Fort Payne when we came through.

I drove us through Alabama and Dominica took over and drove us all of the way through Mississippi with Mississippi being the only state that Dominica drove in its entirety during the entire trip.  We stopped in Meridian, Mississippi to eat at Waffle House there.  That was our last real stop on the trip.

In southern Mississippi, just before crossing into Louisiana, we ran into our first rain of the entire trip.  Not a lot of rain, but enough that our car top carrier is getting tested.

We crossed into Louisiana at a quarter till six in the evening.  The temperature was into the seventies while in Louisiana.  This is very encouraging.

At eight this evening we stopped for our final fuel stop just before crossing into Texas.  Then it was on to our final stretch.  We are so exhausted.  I can’t believe that we are still moving.

We arrived in Bayou Vista, Texas at Joe and Britt’s house on the salt marsh overlooking Tiki Island at half past midnight.  Thirty two straight hours from Peekskill to Bayou Vista.  We were seriously tired.  It had been raining most of the way from southern Mississippi but no serious rain during our drive.  We made out great as far as the weather was concerned.

It was straight to bed for us.  We were pretty much asleep before even getting in to the house.  Joe was waiting up for us but we only did the absolute minimum to get in and to get in to bed.  We are exhausted as we can be.  We’ve been up working hard for forty one hours now and we need to be functioning so that we can celebrate Christmas Eve with the family tomorrow.

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.