Traveling games

We have now successfully unloaded our first load, and now we are on our way to Lafayette, IN to pick up our next load. We will take it to Georgia. Once we get there we will have traveled through 10 different states since we left home. I am having fun keeping track of the states we have been in, as well as the different license plates we see. I have a list of the states, and we are keeping track of the cars and trucks we see. So far we have 26 truck states and 22 car states.

We have also been having a lot of fun playing the "alphabet game" and "I spy". Mitchell isn't always very patient with the alphabet game when we get stuck on a hard letter like "q", but he absolutely loves playing "I spy". He also has a little handheld game player that has mazes and tic tac toe and some other preschool level games that he has been having a lot of fun playing.

It is so fun and exciting to always be going somewhere new. It seems like several times a day we will be driving through a city we have never been. I love seeing new places. I love the cities and the country. It is so green and beautiful in the east. Everywhere you look there are trees and grass. The medians look better than our front yard back home, and we water it every day! You can also see the humidity everywhere you look. It looks foggy outside, and you can see halos around the streetlights at night.

A note about the blog title

In response to a comment, I thought I should explain the title of my blog. For anyone who has seen the movie, "Sound of Music", it should be self explanatory, but for the rest of you I'll explain. The main characters in the movie are a family with the last name of Von Trapp. They are referred to as the Family Von Trapp occasionally, and I thought that Family Von Truck sounded a lot like that, and kind of catchy, so there you go. Now go watch the movie, it is fabulous!

Our first load!

We arrived in Murray, KY yesterday evening and got the Qualcomm installed on the truck. It is a satelite tracking and information thing. It is how information is exchanged between us and the company about loads. After that was installed all we could do was wait for our first load. The request for it came this morning at about 11 o'clock and we had our first load to leave Murray at 8 pm! Since we had time to spare, we got the truck washed and went to Walmart. Then we went to the pick up location early. They already had our trailer loaded so we left early. Now we are on our way to Indianapolis.

I love listening to the Kentucky drawl. I think it is so interesting how we can all speak the same language and sound so different. I can understand how a child grows up to speak like his parents, but why are accents so regional?

A little bit random

This morning we took our first shower in a truck stop. They charged us $9.00 for it! I had no idea it would be so expensive to shower. The good news is that the shower was clean, and now I am too!

The country defineately gets greener the farther east we go. We are now in Missouri (here is a picture I took with my phone because the camera batteries were dead) and there are a lot more trees and rolling hills than were in Kansas. The countryside is quite pretty. This morning Josh started driving before Mitchell was done with his cereal, and it spilled all over the bed. We won't be trying that again.

It is nice to finallly be on the road. With all the repairs that had to be done on the truck, it seemed like it was never going to happen. We are very excited, but still a little nervous and apprehensive about the unknown. That should lessen as time goes on though. Once we've been on the road for a couple of weeks, we should have a good idea of what to expect and the anxiety will leave.

We saw some signs yesterday that advertised an 8000 lb. groundhog and a 5 legged live steer. We decided they must be really desperate for tourists or something. We didn't go check it out.

I am a little bit random today. There is so much to see and experience, and I am not sure which things to share. So feel free to email me or make comments on what you want to hear more about or less about.

It's Official

We are officially on the road! Josh signed all the paperwork last night and this morning in Colorado Springs, and right now we are about half way across Kansas on our way to Murray, KY. Up until the last few miles there have been miles of corn fields stretching as far as the eye can see in all directions. These are only occasionally broken up by already harvested wheat fields. It is strange to be able to look in any direction and not see a single mountain! We can see miles up the road and it is straight as an arrow. I think the strangest thing I've seen so far though is random oil wells in the middle of the corn fields! The kids are doing fine. Keeping Mitchell occupied is proving to be a challenge. He gets bored and then starts annoying me. Hopefully we'll get the hang of it soon!

The Family Von Truck

For those of you who were previously unaware, Josh found a trucking company, SZL Inc., that will let him bring his whole family along on the truck with him as he hauls their trailers across the country. So he finished up doing his local hauling, and began to get his truck ready to go over the road. He rebuilt the motor, purchased all new tires, and had several other small repairs done including the all important air conditioning repair. Several weeks and several thousand dollars later, we packed half of our house into the truck, and we set off to Colorado after spending a week in Utah for my sister, Trista's wedding. Thus begins our journey as the Family Von Truck...