Enjoying life as a family: The big day finally a.k.a One Sad day

The day had finally come. I got home on Saturday, November 26th from Colorado so that I could finish the rest of the packing and start preparing for the move. My parents drove all the way from Colorado to help us move. They got there Wednesday night and my sister and her family came that night as well to help. Thursday morning we went and got the U-Haul while Dawn picked Steve up from the airport, and from the minute he got home we were all working hard. That day is still such a fog for me. I hadn't gotten done as much as I guess I should have and there was lots of stuff to pack in a truck way too small. Luckily my brother-in-law is a pro at packing trucks. We got everything to fit into the U-Haul and what was left was stuffed into the Mariner or tied on top (embarrassing I know, I wanted to die). We had to take things out of boxes and stuff things into open crevices and we did end up leaving some stuff and giving LOTS of things away. It was good to purge a lot of things we didn't need or use anymore. We finished up about 8p.m. Thursday and it was such a wierd feeling leaving my house. We went to dinner and then we all stayed in the Fairfield in Idaho Falls. We got up the next morning and headed towards Arizona! We were able to meet Steve's dad for lunch and it was really nice being able to stop and visit with him for a while. We love every chance we get to see him. We ended up driving through Las Vegas so we stopped and saw Grandma Horst and visited with her and Patty and Stella and the kids. We stayed at a hotel in Henderson and got up early Saturday and started driving. It was slow going driving the U-Haul with the Mariner hitched to the back, packed FULL of stuff. I really enjoyed the time that we all 3 were able to have together. We were trucking along about an hour or so outside of Phoenix when our back inside tire blew out. We were on a little 2 lane highway literally in the middle of nowhere. We called U-Haul, and they told us it would be at least 3 hours before someone could come out and I was NOT happy about that. I then told them how cold it was, that we had a 3 year old and there was a little town called Wickenburg 15 miles up the road and they tried telling me the mechanic shop wasn't an affiliate with them, I don't think there was a mechanic there. Again, long story short, about 40 minutes later a nice mechanic showed up and it took him about an hour to get us all fixed up and we were on the road again. In the meantime I was texting my friend who lives in Bagdad, Arizona which was about an hour behind us, turns out her husband was on his way home and was going to be passing us anytime. We ended up meeting him in Wickenburg at a gas station and we were able to visit for about an hour. It was SOO nice to catch up with him. We hadn't seen him in a couple years. We stopped and had dinner with my friend Stef (who had been waiting for us all day) and caught up with her and then we were on the road again. We pulled into Gail & Andy's house in Tucson about 9:30p.m. when we planned on being there early evening. It was an eventful trip full of visits with our favorite people. It was nice to be at Gail and Andy's among our family. It was really hard for us to leave all the people we love in Idaho behind. It's going to be really hard to start over but we know this is where we need to be!

The kids reading together before bed