Westward we go.

Our travels actually started on Sunday after church.  This first leg only took us about six-and-a-half hours.  Granted, if we were only driving our car then that would be a bit longer than normal, but with having a U-haul truck as well, we actually made pretty good time.  The kids and I were in the car, and Chris was all alone in the U-haul. (Yeah, I felt so bad for him all alone in there.)  The kids know this drive to Mamaw and Papaw's pretty well so they were anticipating crossing over state lines.  We yelled goodbye to each state as we left and hello to the new one that we were entering.

Welcome to Illinois

Welcome to Missouri

You know, it's slightly difficult to take pictures, drive, and try to maintain a sane level of chaos in a car with a backseat that is fully loaded with children.

We made it to Missouri just fine, spent the night, and then set out for our very long day of driving the next morning.

Content for now.

This is a pre-stockyard stop photo.

We started out just fine making our way through Missouri.  However, my always oh-so-cheerful three-year-old (The one with the trademark crying/howling face.) decided that she should attempt to shatter the car windows with her screams while also trying to kick through the back of my seat.  This little experiment led to us stopping at the Joplin Stockyard for a brief disciplinary restart.

It seemed to take forrrrrreeeevvvvverrrr to get out of Missouri but finally we made it to Oklahoma where we (or rather I because I didn't turn the walkie talkie on for the entire episode) experienced another screaming fit while driving through roadwork that stuck us in one lane at reduced speed without anywhere to pull over.  However, we did see some lovely wind farms later on.  :)

Welcome to Oklahoma

 See the lovely windfarms.

Chris and I each messed up at one toll a piece along the toll roads in Oklahoma and had to pull over and go back to pay.  Yeah, that was great fun. 

 Welcome to Texas

Finally we made it to the Texas state line as the sun was starting to set.  The picture above actually grasps my end of the day mental state quite well. Dark and shaky.  We continued on to drive in the darkness to where Chris and I found visual proof that not everything is bigger in Texas.  :)  

 This is the cross in Illinois.  It is very large.

This is a similar cross in Texas.  It is not very large, comparatively

We made a stop for gas for the U-haul before we reached Amarillo. We didn't have enough gas in the U-haul to make it to Amarillo.  We were very happy to see this gas station and then we were very sad. Apparently, we were mistaken in thinking that this gas station actually wanted to conduct any business at 10 almost 11pm at night.  The pump refused our credit card (It did accept another lady's debit card while we were there.). The owners were inside the store, but they had the door closed and locked and did not want to open up so we could get some gas.  They gave us directions to another gas station down the road into whatever little town we stopped at.   All of the slasher/horror movies involving desolate areas and wrong directions flashed through my mind as we drove into this run-down little town. (Unfortunately, I have seen quite a few.)  

Obviously nothing of horror movie value happened since you are reading this blog, and the gas was actually slightly cheaper at the second gas station.  We made it back to the Interstate and continued on our way.  We finally made it into Plainview (We were on the road from 8:30am Monday morning until 1:17am Tuesday morning.) and found a hotel room for us to sleep in before moving in to our house the next morning.

That's our trip in a nutshell.  I'll share house photos and our painting projects in upcoming posts.