A Little Rushed

As much as I would love to sit here and write about everything that has gone on since Kevin got back from California, we have begun our journey to Alaska, and I am limited to a few minutes on the laptop before we have to start getting ready to hit the road again.

First of all, YES, we did get a new car!!! Well, kinda... It was Kevin's parents, and they were generous enough to let us take over the payments on it. As much as I love my 4Runner, it was a 1999 and had 218,000 miles on it! We were just a little worried about how "the beast" would handle driving 4000 miles and dealing with Alaska weather. We are loving our Chrysler Pacifica! It definitely makes me want to have a car seat with a baby in the back already since it is kind of a mix between a SUV and a mini-van.

But onto the exciting stuff...

We left Huntsville, Texas yesterday (March 14, 2010) at 11:49 am. Our original goal was to get to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It is roughly a 12 hour drive from Huntsville, and we figured that wasn't too bad. So we drove, and drove, and drove some more. Finally around 9:30 pm (Mountain Time) we crossed into New Mexico! I just kept looking at the time and the estimated time of arrival on the GPS. It had become a count down, 4 hours, 3 hours, 2 hours left!! I was so ready to take a hot shower and crawl into bed. We stopped to get gas (thank God!!) and it was pouring down rain. I let Kevin drive since I hate driving in the rain, and we started on our way again. A few minutes down the road the rain started turning to slush. I thought it was hail, but it was more like sleet. At this point we are in the middle of absolutely nowhere and it starts snowing. We are thinking, oh how pretty, this is getting us ready for Alaska, blah blah blah. Well as we are trucking along (the speed limit is 75!) we see a car at almost a complete stop in the middle of road. As we slow down and get closer we see the road is covered in snow and ice so we slow way down. The roads just continued to get worse and so did the snow. We were stuck in a full on blizzard! Cars were running off the road and semi trucks were parked along the side of the road as if admitting defeat. I, naturally, begin to have a break down thinking we are going to die on our first day of the move! I just sat with my eyes closed (the snow was making me sick) and prayed that we could make it to any hotel safe. We checked the GPS and there was nothing until Albuquerque, which was 80 miles away! At this point traffic really slowed down, and stopped. We sat there for over an hour. We turned the car off to conserve gas and the battery. I took a nice little nap, while Kevin began sewing his name tapes onto his new uniforms (I'm sure we were a sight for sore eyes...) Once the traffic started moving again we realized the roads had been plowed and salted. It was so much easier and less stressful from that point on. We checked into our hotel around 3 am (Mountain time) and crashed out!

I just thank God that we were able to get through all of that last night safely and now we really are prepared for Alaska! We never imagined we would drive through such bad weather until we got to Canada... I guess we were wrong!!

But for today, we will be getting on the road around noon and driving to LAS VEGAS!!! We wont have much time to do anything, but we plan on just walking down the strip and stopping in the Mirage and the Bellagio. We will be staying at the Trump Hotel (one of the few that was pet-friendly), and I am sure I will have tons of pictures to post tomorrow!