Welcome!
I realize that I'm skipping a huge part of "the beginning" by moving past the wedding weekend to tell you about our traveling adventures, but that post will come soon enough. :o)
On Monday, Damion and I left our weekend getaway home in Belmont, NC to drive to Raleigh to meet up with his parents. They stayed after the wedding to wait for us so we could have some help getting the moving truck packed up for the move to Louisiana.
The rain had already started when we left at 6:45 a.m., but we were excited and anxious to get the day started! We drove through Hickory to stop by my parents' house to drop off a few things and pick up some of our stuff that we left at the wedding. It was a pretty quick stop, and we were on our way again. The rain continued pretty hard the whole trip, but we finally made it to Cary where we were to pick up our rental truck and dolly for my car. The exchange went well, and we decided to leave the car off the dolly (which ended up costing us a LOT of time... more on that soon) and head on to my storage unit to meet up with Damion's parents. In no time at all, with the rain tapering off nicely, Damion and his dad did a great job getting all my things and our wedding gifts cleared out of storage and onto the truck. Because the weather forecast didn't seem to be cooperating with us for the rest of the day, we decided to stop there for the day. His parents took the truck to get a lock and get it parked for the night at their hotel, while Damion and I went to our apartments to finish up as much as the moving preparations as we could. It was still a busy evening, but we felt ready!
Tuesday morning, his parents met up with us at my apartment and got it all loaded up. Next, we moved to downtown to clear out Damion's apartment. Our last stop, we hoped, was to drive through Garner and pick up a couple of appliances from a friend of mine. Once we got that taken care of, we started to load up my car onto the dolly... only to find that the one they had given us (recommended for my car) didn't work. It scraped up my front bumper, and we quickly realized this wouldn't work at all. Even if we had forced the car over the front tire stoppers, it would have ripped the bumper completely off my car to get it rolled back off the dolly. Sad!
We called the rental truck company to find out what to do about getting a different style of dolly (it's now 4 p.m., mind you) and they told us they would need a maximum of 2 hours to handle it for us. So, we headed off to eat some dinner and wait for the call. As 6 p.m. neared, we still hadn't heard anything, and I started to become nervous about all these offices closing for the day and no one helping us. Sure enough, when I called back at 5:55 p.m., the customer service agent told me they would be closing in 5 minutes, so my request was probably pushed off until the next morning. Well, that wasn't good news! We had a LONG way to drive and wanted to get started! We updated our information for them to call us and decided to just drive at least a few hours and get started. We made it to Bishopville, SC and stopped for the night.
The next morning, we called again to check on the status and told them we would be heading toward Columbia, SC. Right as we were arriving into the city, they called us back to let us know they had a car carrier for us and we could exchange out the dolly. This was good news, though it was just one more thing that continued to delay us. FINALLY, now nearly 1 p.m. on Wednesday, we were pulling out of Columbia, SC to finish the long drive to Louisiana. Damion's parents went on ahead of us so they could get back and settled before his dad needed to leave for work offshore, and Damion and I moved at the best pace as possible. It took FOREVER! But, finally - around 4 a.m. Central Time - we pulled up in front of our new home. :o) Even as exhausted as we were, we were excited to be here! We didn't even take a single thing inside the house with us.. we just walked in and collapsed into one of the beds already here.
The next day, Thursday, was filled with a LOT of work - unloading the truck, starting to move some things out of the house to have room for our things, cleaning, etc. Finally, in the evening, the truck was empty and we knew that we'd be fine for our 9 a.m. drop off on Friday morning with the truck/car carrier.
More later - and yes, some photos, but there's the story of our first roadtrip adventure as husband and wife!
** A HUGE HUGE THANK YOU to Damion's family for all they did for this! Help with moving our things, the truck, the driving, the unloading, the cleaning, etc. We are so happy to be so loved by our families! **
