A Move Begins: Day One

This morning I woke up in Buffalo, Wyoming and found our truck covered with blood and guts. This is hard to avoid when you're driving 704 miles in one-lane construction zones that are littered with carcass after carcass of dead wildlife.

What I'm trying to tell you is that our first day of the Spokane to Minneapolis move did not go as planned.

First, we left a bit later than we had intended. There were too many people to say goodbye to, and we may have got a little too caught up in our game of Uhual tetris (what is so satisfying about filling every square inch of a space, flipping chairs, and boxes, and end tables, and giant clocks this way and that until you've filled every square inch?).

The loading really wasn't too bad. Here's Joe showing off.

Anyway, what was supposed to take ten hours ended up taking more like 13.5. Here's a few reasons why:

Dead bodies everywhere
Deer, raccoon, a bunch of unidentifiables.
Endless construction
Seriously, after a while it felt like Montana was mocking us. We started one construction zone at 55, and it slowly kept reintroducing new signs: 45, 35, 25, and then 15. We were waiting for the sign that said "just give up."
Trailer Pulling
This probably should have occurred to us, but pulling a sizable trailer through the mountains takes more time.
Tears
It's hard to drive while you're crying. (Okay, that was just me, and they were goodbye tears not distress tears).

So, after arriving in Buffalo at 3:30 a.m.,we decided it wasn't realistic to actually get to Minneapolis on day two. We'll see how far we get today (after changing our burnt-out headlight).

And now, to South Dakota we go! Back to what we are now calling the Blood Wagon.

Oh and here are some pictures of our last few days in Spokane and day one of the trip.