Road Trip: Day 1

It’s finally here. After months of planning, we are finally moving to Seattle. The trek with selling the house was quite an ordeal – especially when dealing with the city inspectors for the garage remodel we did. But we passed all inspections just under the wire. It was also a challenge to line up all the shippers – we shipped George and Scout, we shipped Emily’s car, and we shipped all our furniture. 

Only one of those three things happened on time. BUT, we built in enough of a buffer that everything was able to happen before we left Gainesville, and the most important day (Closing Day) went off without a hitch.

Emily and I dropped the kids off with Nana and Data while we signed the papers. Signing papers to sell is much quicker than signing papers to buy. We then picked up the kids, said our last goodbyes, and began our trek. 

Around hour two we got the call from our realtor that the buyers had finished signing and everything was done. PLUS, there was one mistake in the paperwork and we actually got $1000 more than we thought – bonus!!

This evening we made it to Montgomery, Alabama and we are staying with our good friends Betty and Jon Carroll and their three daughters. 

Cates is in heaven with all the dollhouses and pink toys. And Wickham loves to have a new place to run around. We’ll hang out with the Carrolls for a little bit more tomorrow and then we’ll be off on leg two!

Stay tuned for more road trip adventures with the #travelingkirbies!

The Kirbies’ Great American Road Trip

As of yesterday, I no longer work for the University of Florida and PK Yonge. It is a truly bittersweet moment with many mixed emotions. It is really nice to go from one great job to another great job, but the downside is that you are really going to miss the first great job in the process.  Still, there are a lot of exciting times ahead and one of them is our trip to the Pacific Northwest. We normally only do one big trip a year, but we had already made plans for Argentina when the whole job switch came about. So here we are, getting ready to embark on trip number two of 2016.

We have exactly two weeks before we pack our truck, but we have already mapped out our upcoming trip. The basic structure of the trip will be to drive around 6-8 hours a day. While a solo driver or a couple might try for 10-12 hours a day, 6-8 will be a pretty good feat while having a toddler and a four year old in the car.

We’ll head out of Gainesville on June 30 and our first stop will be in Montgomery, Alabama where we will visit our good friends, Jon and Betty Carroll and their girls. There isn’t much to see in Montgomery itself, but time with friends is way better than tourist must-sees, so we are excited to spend some time with them.

Next we will head out to St. Louis. We don’t plan to really stop in St. Louis except to spend a couple of hours to visit the Gateway Arch. I visited the Arch when in St. Louis a few years ago for a Gator game and Emily visited it as a kid. However, we thought it would be fun to take the kids and symbolically pass through it on our way West.

After St. Louis, our next visit will be Minneapolis where we will visit some more friends – the Lee-Reid family. We met the Lee-Reids through our mutual love of travel (and blogging about it). You can see Randy’s travel blog here and Michelle’s here. They are currently on their big annual trip – this time to Iceland! We plan to stay two nights in Minneapolis with them and experience some Midwestern Americana on July 4.

Our next stop will be Rapid City, SD which is just outside the Black Hills National Forest, home to Mount Rushmore. I cannot imagine that I will be passing through South Dakota many more times in my life, so I’m excited to be able to stop and see this incredible monument.

After Mount Rushmore, we will have two more stops, one in Billings, Montana and one in Spokane, Washington before we finally make it to our new house in Kirkland (just outside Seattle) on July 8.

Our new house in Kirkland

Billings, Montana

Spokane, Washington

Both Emily and I are excited about the trip. We bought a book called Road Food that we learned about on the Rick Steves radio show (and podcast) to help us find one-of-a-kind restaurants all along our route. We will also be adding several states to our “visited” list. For me that will include Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, and Idaho. It also looks like we’ll be in Wyoming for about an hour, not sure if we’re going to count that one or not :P.

So…it’s starting to get real! On to our greatest adventure yet!