Day 1

Madelyn and I decided that keeping a blog would be a good way to keep everyone updated on what we are doing.

For those of you who do not know, we are now living in Austin. After a grueling three day road trip we have arrived, unpacked our moving truck, and settled into our temporary residence.

The road trip was pretty uneventful. We left Salt Lake with the intention of "seeing the country", and using our move as a little mini-vacation. Unfortunatly there is nothing worth seeing between Utah and Texas (we did make one stop, but I'll talk about that later).

The trip started out on Halloween, which was a perfect day to be driving a 16 foot moving truck and pulling a car behind us. This was officially the scariest and most terrifying Halloween I have ever had. The truck and trailer cannot seem to agree on the same direction, the truck would pull one way, and the trailer would pull the other. I can now cross "Trucker" off my list of possible occupations.

After the most horrible driving experiences of our lives we made it to Denver, CO, which we have started to call the "Fraud City". It's a fraud because it is nowhere near the mountains as advertised, infact I did not see any mountains in Denver. I realized that people in Salt Lake are spoiled with their proximity to the mountains.

Day two was much more enjoyable (because of the straight, flat roads), but their wasn't much happening on our drive across Kansas. The highlight of our day was making it to McDonalds by 10:30 so we could have breakfast......we were worried that we might be too late. When the highlight of your day is McDonalds, its a pretty uneventful day. But thankfully, we were able to push through and make it all the way to Oklahoma City for the night.

Sometimes, when its late at night and you are desperate for sleep you don't seem to realize things that you may usually notice. When we stoped at the hotel in Oklahoma City I didn't think twice about the bullet proof glass with the metal slide seperating me from the lady behind the counter. I didn't really reconsider our choice of hotel after passing a buisness called "Club XXXtasy", I was just ready to stop driving. It was the morning after, when everything was light, that I realized we may have picked the worst possible neighborhood in Oklahoma City to stay in. So after a quick shower (with a soap dispenser instead of a bar of soap), we were on our way.

The last day was the best day of the trip. The area near the Texas border in Oklahoma was really cool, and the fall colors were just as bright as up in the mountains in Salt Lake. We also were able to start out the day with the correct words to the song "Oklahoma" (thanks to Kathryn). When were we ever again going to be able to sing the song "Oklahoma" in Oklahoma? So, we sang it about 10 times at least. We sang the song so much that we even made up a little dance, which ended with our new sign for Oklahoma (See Picture Above).

While we were driving in Oklahoma I saw some billboards for a place called "Arbuckle Wilderness". This is a place I visited frequently as a little kid, and that I've told Madelyn a lot about. So when we saw the signs, we knew we had to stop. Arbuckle Wilderness is a Zoo but you stay in your car, and you drive in the animals cages. You are also given food and you are allowed to feed the animals from your car. Its a bizarre concept to grasp, and I think that's why Madelyn wanted to go. I think deep down she belived I was making all of this up. Madelyn learned two things that day: One is that as bizarre as something sounds, don't doubt it, because the South is a weird place. And Two, Madelyn is terrified of Ostriches. Here is a picture:

http://img89.imageshack.us/img89/2431/dscn0486bs6.jpg

Before we knew it we were pulling into Austin and our three day long road trip was finally over. Thats about all there is to report about that, but we'll post something soon. Leave some comments if you would like!