And the journey begins.

On Sunday, February 15th 2015, I walked out the door of my house for the last time, took a long look around, and left New Orleans for the last time as a New Orleanian.  I know the city will always be part of me, and I'll always be at least a little bit of a New Orleanian in my heart.  As I wrote previously, the 10+ years I lived there were absolutely transformative, in a very good way (in the end!).  I look at it this way: I spent my childhood in Penfield, but I grew up in New Orleans.

On to the next adventure, right??  I can't say there weren't a few tears as we rolled by all the familiar places, down streets I've traveled for the last decade.  But once we got out of the city, I got myself under control and started to get into Journey Mode.  A big step out of the familiar, a leap into the unknown, and one step closer to Alaska!  I thought about all the great things I'm so excited for- HORSES!, mountains, trails, open spaces, non-sweltering summers.... but yeah, mostly horses.  Walking out of my house with my morning cup of coffee to pet the horses in their pasture will be nothing short of a dream come true.

But first, we have to get there.  And hoo boy, we had our hands full.  We overnighted in northern Alabama (traveling slow bc of pulling the trailer) and watched the Weather Channel talk about the epic winter storm conditions that were going to be basically across our entire route for the entire next day.  Now I've seen some bad weather, but this was impressive.  All the way from Alabama to Ohio there was snow, sleet, single digit temps, ice ice ice, and terrible driving conditions.  Rich drove through some of the worst winter weather possible for TEN straight hours.  I really don't know how he did it; I would've gotten in seventeen accidents and gotten stuck countless times.  Every mile almost, we would pass another accident or a car/truck/semi in the ditch.  Being that this snow was in Tennessee and Kentucky, who aren't too used to this severe of weather, most of the highway was completely untouched.  No salt, no plowing, nothing.  It was really ridiculous, actually.

This was I-65.  The roads looked like this the entire day.

 

And as we went along, a film of ice kept building up on the truck and the trailer.  It got thick enough that it probably added several hundred pounds of weight, and these bizarre-looking "horns" that probably weighed as much as me built up on the front of the trailer.  Never seen anything like it.  All of the cars got snow buildup on the BACK, which was also weird.

What should've been about a ten hour ride took at least sixteen.  The last 2 hours were on good roads finally, but at that point it was just painful.  I can't imagine we'll see anything worse than that on the road to Alaska.  And even if we do, we wouldn't have to drive through it for sixteen hours, we'd just stop and wait it out.  So anyone who's worried about us should feel better knowing we made it through yesterday.  And we didn't even kill each other!  Or even want to (...I think...). That may have been the most impressive part.  The dogs hung in there really well too.

Now we're in somewhat of a holding pattern until we can leave for the Big Drive.  The house deal is supposed to close in mid-March so we're going to try to time our arrival as close to that as possible.  We plan on spending about 2 weeks on the road.  But for now, no rest for the weary, as Rich has been working on fixing the water supply to the house all day.  (No rest for him, anyway, I already took a nap.  Shh don't tell.)