We have made it to our new home in Fort Morgan, Colorado. The inside of the house is chaos, but we’re beginning to settle bit by bit. We are incredibly grateful to be here all together, past some of the most difficult steps in this transition. The house is a downsize, so it makes it tricky to figure out where everything should go and which items should maybe leave our family.
For the house-curious, I will mention two favorite things. One is the whole front of the house. It’s cute from the outside with a fairly large front yard and what looks like some decent grass, especially considering the challenges of keeping a lawn in this area. Inside the good-looking front door is a living room and a room we are going to call the school room that are bright and spacious. There are big windows that face west, which is the other highlight. We are on the far western edge of town, and the front of the house faces west. We are going to be able to enjoy beautiful sunsets looking out over a big farm field almost every sunny day, of which there are lots here.
To rewind back to our experience leaving Pennsylvania, let’s just say we were blessed in huge ways over and over again, especially by our church family there. I still get teary just thinking about it. Friends provided meals over the last few days. A friend came and helped pack the whole kitchen. Friends made travel snack/fun/encouragement bags for the whole family. For those who provided the heavy-laden snack bag for me, no, I didn’t get through all of the snacks as I covered the 1500 miles, but let’s just say I didn’t need to purchase any other food, just coffee.
We had two different trips. I took the expedited northern route with the moving truck and two cats. We made it in just over 30 hours, with minimal stops. Misha and the kids left a few hours after me and had two overnight stops, staying with friends along the way in St. Louis and western Nebraska. We were both blessed with amazing weather and road conditions. I just encountered a couple of minor snow flurries.
I should elaborate more on my trip, especially for those who are wondering about traveling with cats. Though we explored some of the options for medicating the cats, especially the one with exceptional travel anxiety, we opted to not treat. Maybe that was a mistake. To be honest, it was a miserable trip. There was howling most of the way, which didn’t help the stress of driving a 26-foot loaded moving truck. It was a weird experience to process the emotions of driving away from Indiana, PA, in the dark of the morning and adapt to the driving challenges while listening to the deafening howls.
In western Iowa, I stopped at a rest area (parking with the big rigs!) with the intention of getting a little bit of sleep. I also wanted to let the cats out of their carriers to stretch their legs, use the litter box on the passenger side floor, drink, and eat. The exceptional howler pranced out of his crate like nothing had happened, though he didn’t eat. Let’s just say that the blanket inside his crate needed to be thrown away at this point, for reasons you can likely guess. The friendly, quieter cat (whose crate blanket was still clean and dry) was lethargic, which started to make me nervous. Though we were there four hours, I only slept maybe one hour. The most exasperating part was when I was ready to get back on the road. The quiet(er) cat had found a tight space under the driver seat and wouldn’t come out. With several bars wrapped around him, pulling him by his scruff just didn’t work. We were in a tight space with several items around. I didn’t want to open the door, with fear that if he decided to bolt, we might never see him again. And, again, I wasn’t exactly rested. With the help of a moment of prayer, I finally figured out a way to scare him out with a little stake-like item that had been packed in the cab so we could get back on the road and finish the trip, with a whole new round of deafening howling.
It was weird to arrive at our new home without Misha and the kids. It didn’t feel right. To be honest, I spent the 26 hours at the house without them feeling incredibly awkward and alone, despite my IAFR teammate friends coming over to help start the move-in process and have dinner together. Most of my life I have been quite willing to do things alone, even big things. I’m an adventurous introvert. But this brief time really opened my eyes to how much my marriage and family have become critically important to me. I have changed for the better, in my opinion, but those hours were especially hard, which made it that much sweeter when I finally saw Letu (our minivan) pull up in front of the house.
Now I’m excited to start meeting people and engaging in work activities. Even simply meeting in person with my teammates is such a treat after so many Zoom sessions over the past year. I’m excited to see how the adventure of the coming weeks/months/years is going to unfold, while also continuing to be incredibly grateful for family, friends, and supporters scattered here and there who are in this with us and at times finding amazing ways to show incredible care and hospitality to us, in ways similar to how I hope to approach many relationships here in Fort Morgan.