Amarillo

Kevin got a new job in Amarillo.  They made him an offer that he couldn't refuse, and so our family relocated, once again.

This time, the relocation package was a little bit more flexible.  In that we got to decide how we moved and when, instead of having a consultant schedule everything according to their standard plan.

We decided that I would pack everything up.  This was nice because I got to go through our stuff and we didn't move any junk this time, or anything that the kids had outgrown.  It was also nice because I packed stuff in a way that made sense to me, so that I could find things again when unpacking.  (This idea works in theory, but it wasn't perfect.  It was WAY better than some of the random packing the movers did last time, though.)



There is always pizza involved when moving.  The kids can put away one medium pepperoni pizza, one small cheese stick, and one chocolate chip pizza in one sitting.  Pretty much by themselves.  How could teenage boys eat any more than that?  I don't want to know, but I'm sure I will find out.

Then we had movers come and load up the trucks.  We decided to drive them ourselves.  I got a 20 foot truck with a flatbed hitch for my SUV.  Kevin drove a 26 foot truck with his car on the back of it.  Remember that it took a semi truck to move us down to Texas in the first place.  Even after we downsized our stuff a bit, we still needed a lot of truck space, and neither of us is licensed to drive a semi.  So we did two trucks and it worked great.  In fact, we had the movers load all the furniture into the small truck, and all the boxes and other miscellaneous stuff into the other truck.  That way when we got there, we could unload the furniture first with ease.

My ride

Lex was my co-pilot.  Connor rode with Kevin.

Amarillo is 10 hours away from Houston.  Texas is so incredibly huge! 

When we lived in Ohio, we had a map hanging up that had a couple of circles centered on our house.  Each circle represented a driving distance, so we would know how far away the kids could travel for a trip given the number of days we had available to travel.  From Central Ohio, a 10 hour trip was to a place several states away.  In some cases, it was a trip to Canada!

The kids did really great on the drive.  We had to stop to buy gas for the trucks more often than we had to stop for the kids.  They loved sitting up high and in front, too.  Connor and Lex shared the iPad and the DVD player, switching when we made stops.  The trip was incredibly smooth.

We arrived late at night, got the keys to our apartment, and got the sleeping bags out of the back of my SUV for the night, and waited for the movers to arrive in the morning to unload the trucks. 

They were an hour late, because it was the day the clocks moved forward.  But it was alright because they were the most happy, friendly movers in the universe.  They were sunshine personified, even while carrying something really heavy that didn't fit through the doorway the way they had it positioned.  It was incredible.  They were such nice, careful, good movers, and they had everything unloaded well before lunch.