Our Great(?) Moving Adventure

We're here in Tennessee now!  Everyone kept telling us that this move would be a wonderful adventure, we'd love it, and we can tell our children about it (except I'd never heard my parents' own early marriage moving story until we were in the middle of our own, so maybe these stories are ones you hide deep in your soul until you need to make someone feel better about their own experience).  But no, it was pretty rough, thanks to our truck.  We'd saved up for a while to afford this move and to afford to buy furniture, etc. when we got here, and it's a good thing we did!

Two days before we left, our truck died in a drive-through in Provo.  Our mechanics didn't know what the problem was, but they did say that our spark plugs and wires looked pretty bad so we got all those replaced.  After lots of prayers, we started our drive.

We were driving across Wyoming on Thursday and when we stopped to get gas, our car died right there on the off ramp.  We tried calling some mechanics but they were full until Monday.  Finally it started after cooling off and we went to an auto parts store, where Bill checked our engine out.  We felt very scolded as Bill shook his head and face-palmed over the state of our transmission fluid.  "Dirty," he said.  "And burnt.  But it should get you to Colorado.  I hope."

It did get us to Colorado...and there the car died again while in some stop and go traffic.  Here we are by the side of the road.  We really enjoy the motto on the side of our trailer: "America's moving adventure!"

Here's James pretending he knows how to fix our car.

We let it cool down again (and prayed pretty hard) and made it to a mechanic near my parents' house.  After checking things out, our mechanic Oliver said that he was 60% sure the problem involved our fuel pump.  While that was neither reassuring nor cheap, we changed our fuel pump and got a transmission flush.

We got to see some really beautiful things while we drove.  We saw two zebras grazing in a pasture in Kansas.  (No joke.  Zebras.  Two of them!)  Here's the St. Louis bridge, which James was pretty excited about driving on:

All was well until just past St. Louis when the truck shuddered violently while we stopped for lunch.  The nearest mechanic was a dealership that said some of our brand new wires had melted in our hot engine and needed to be replaced.  We got going again a few hours later and our truck has behaved ever since!  We drove through some impressive thunderstorms (or maybe just the same storm many times?) and got to see the widest rainbow I'd ever seen (diameter-wise, that is).  We also saw both ends of the rainbow at different times, which was fun.

Now we're here in Tennessee at our new place!  It's a duplex and is much more fun than I'd expected.  There's not a stitch of carpet in it, but lots of nice wood laminate flooring.  We have two bedrooms now, as well as a bigger kitchen and some yard space.  Whoever lived here before had a dog with a robust digestive system, and I'm sure the grass will grow all the greener because of it.

Our trip was hard, but mostly because of truck and monetary worries, and we've had many miracles in that regard and have faith that things will be okay.

Things we learned on our trip:
-St. Louis is so named because French explorers were big fans of King Louis IX around the time it was discovered and named.
-Apparently the Cumberland Gap (approximately where we live) is a big deal.
-Tennessee is very green and sprawling.  There aren't a lot of fences between yards, just lots of rolling areas that merge and are dewy and open.
-Our town is very, very small. We do have a Sonic, though!  We even have a Red Box!
-We actually live in New Tazewell, not Tazewell, but they're kind of the same thing.
-There are no pots of gold at the ends of rainbows. Wouldn't that have been helpful?
-If your semi's trailer breaks in half on the highway and loses all its cargo, it blocks traffic for a very, very long time. 
-Jim Dale is an excellent reader of Harry Potter.
-Faith and prayers are a wonder!

And now we're here!