Sooooo quiet

I've been very quiet. I blame the house and I blame Berry.

The house is taking a lot of time to get organised. We're painting first and I've figured out that 90% of painting is actually taping. Especially if the builders have gone nuts with crown molding and fancy baseboards and lots of angles. Ohhh the angles. Pretty to look at, hell to tape.

Here's Nathan, cutting in some of the corners...


So there's that... But now (thanks to Nathan's dad, who shall be sainted at a later date) the entire downstairs living area is painted and it's beeeyoootiful. So fabulous. Painting over the grey with Travertine has completely transformed it, and we're feeling luckier by the minute.

Or we would be, if we weren't so sick. That's where blaming Berry comes in. Two half-days in daycare and she brings home an array of viruses a medical textbook would be proud of. Honestly, it's like she went around collecting them. So she's been really sick and miserable for a week now, and we've been falling like dominoes ever since.

There should be a rule against having to take care of a sick toddler when you're sick yourself. I mean really. It feels impossible and very unfair, and makes me seriously consider things like how one might go about getting a nanny. And a maid. Or a sidekick of any kind, really.

Speaking of sidekicks, here is Berry helping her Grandpa put the very glamorous Ikea table back together... See? It really is child's play.

Moving In

This weekend, while other people went fishing and to the movies and out to bars and riding in parks and did all kinds of other fabulously relaxing things, we moved into our house. And... we moved into our house.

We went to Sherwin Williams and Home Depot and scrubbed cupboards and went to the storage place and carried boxes and assembled furniture and unpacked boxes and did trash runs and met neighbours and emptied suitcases and arranged the kitchen and swept and mopped, and met with security people and cable guys and cleaned the bathrooms and unpacked more boxes.

et cetera....

We're still working on it. It's really hard but that's offset by the excitement element – all the planning and decorating and the wow, this is really ours feeling. My least favourite parts are the moments where you find yourself surrounded by half-unpacked boxes, open cupboards and chaos, and you think this.will.never.end.

Disorder makes me deeply nervous, and it renders Nathan slightly unhinged – so for us moving house is awesome.

Yeah. If Nathan's ever-amazing dad hadn't driven down from Dallas to help us, we might well be rocking in the corner by now, and need some therapy.

Oh – the picture above shows part of upstairs. The architect who designed this house was known to have an abiding affection for angles and interesting (but functional) floor plans, so it's tough to show the full effect. The picture below is our bedroom. Those curtains have got to go. The very small girl can stay.

Welcome to Louisiana

Crawfish are big in Louisiana, but not this big.

This monster welcomes people at Lisa and Rocky Sonnier's famous cabins and restaurant in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana -- and it's just one of the place's many quirky charms.

Mike Rowe filmed an episode of Dirty Jobs here, about making "cracklins". Fabulous, I'm told, but a bit bad for you. That's the cracklins, not Mike Rowe. Although.....

More friends

Berry made a couple of furry friends at Northpark, the giant mall in Dallas. But they wouldn't share their bikes, and they wouldn't come out from behind that glass.

Really, Makai was much more fun.

Most delightful

With 2500 miles down and 500 miles to go, this was the fortune I got at a Chinese restaurant in Dallas:

"You are about to embark on a most delightful journey!"

Hmm.

Friends

We finally made it to Dallas, back to civilisation -- and even though it was just an extended pit-stop, Berry wasted no time finding her feet.

First order of business: make some new friends. Check. Meet Makai, Berry's new friend.

The entire friendship consisted of a half-hour chasing each other around the garden restaurant at Northpark, but they had a really fantastic time...

West Texas

Right about here, Paula let out a big sigh and said, "Oh, this is horrific."

And that's west Texas for you....

.

Somewhere in Colorado...

Six hundred and thirty miles. Thirteen hours. More than half a day. And did I mention 630 miles?

That's how far it is from Tremonton, Utah to Pueblo, Colorado, and we drove it all in one day. This time Berry regained her Toddler of the Day award (improving on her previous day's performance) and we had Bob The Builder playing all day, instead of The Wiggles.



Thirteen hours of anywhere gets very boring, and Utah and Wyoming are long on endless plains and short on Starbucks, which makes staying awake a bit tricky. But at least we had fabulous things waiting for us at the end of the road.



Joe and Christy, Nathan's godparents, are fabulous artists who live in this amazing place just outside Pueblo, Colorado. They have llamas living across the street and acres of wildlife all around. What artist wouldn't love to live here?




Joe took us for a trek around the back of their land and casually (too casually, I thought) mentioned the bears they see roaming around up there. BEARS! Bears, bears, bears. I've been quite preoccupied with the dangers of bears and cougars and mountain lions and other non-Australian wildlife threats, ever since I moved to the States. And particularly since I read about bear attacks in Bill Bryson's A Walk In The Woods. In his book about Australia (In A Sunburned Country), Bryson is hilariously liberal in detailing how Australia is crawling with the most dangerous animals on the planet -- and ok, you can argue that. But very few of Australia's- most-dangerous will take your limb off for choosing the wrong path on a hike. Kill you in seconds with poison, yes -- but they'll leave your limbs in place. And I'm quite fond of my limbs.


Anyway, that gave me some pause for the rest of the hike, especially when Joe pointed out where one of their neighbours had been leaving large roadkill out for the bears to eat. Like they needed encouragement or something... the bones were picked disturbingly bare.

Christy is a transplanted Southern belle, so after our scary/pretty walk, we had the most incredible southern fried chicken and potato salad and all kinds of other things you should never eat if you want to live a long time. It would've been a fantastic dinner on any day, but it was especially, heartbreakingly good after miles of Denny's dinners and McDonald's salads.

That night we slept upstairs in the fabulous house that Joe built. Usually when people say "I built this house" they don't mean with my own two hands -- but that's what Joe means. It's an incredible place. And in the morning, just to make sure our stay would be completely unforgettable, this was the sunrise.




I'm telling you, those llamas are living the good life...

Running around America

A towering formation over the playground where we stopped in Green River. Berry might remember it for the biggest slippery slide she's ever been on -- I'll remember it for the fantastic rocks.

(It's taken me so long to get an internet connection tough enough to upload all my roadtrip photos -- things are going to be kind of slow coming round on the travelling stuff. But I don't care if you don't.)

Moving a letterpress... again

My marvellous old Chandler & Price letterpress is on the move again, and this time we learned from our mistakes! Last time was very nearly a disaster...

We hired a tow-truck guy to lift it straight into the Penske (he looked skeptical when he saw it, but everything worked fine) and 3000-odd miles later, Nathan and Dad backed the truck up to a raised storage unit and used the pallet jack to wheel it right in. So: no 3am terrors and no endless physics questions.

Much better!

A moment

This little storybook moment is brought to you by Dad/Dave/Grandpa... who came all the way from Dallas to Seattle to work way harder than he should, so that our move would go smoothly, and to give Berry some much-needed Grandpa Time.

She's a huge fan, and so are we.

Nobody was hurt...

...but this semi lost its trailer and the whole load on one of the many, many bendy roads we drove along on the way to Bend, Oregon. What a mess.

Berry and a Lake

A few days ago we stopped in Oregon by a very, very windy lake. It was impressively beautiful, but Berry was nearly blown away.

Oh Oregon

Oh Oregon... you are so pretty. Don't let it go to your head.

Chikins

These were for sale in the crazy little middle-of-nowhere shop by the service station and the Artistic Taxidermy stand.

I think they're priceless.

Across America... and Artistic Taxidermy

To All The Fortunate People Who Are Not Travelling Across America With Berry:

Yesterday we drove 600 miles. That's like Brisbane to Sydney, and it felt like it too. We were all chirpy (or hungover, depending on the person) after a good night at the great McMenamin's in Bend, Oregon, and we set off at 6.30am so that we could take advantage of Berry's "sleeping hours" until about 9.30am. We were going to get some very peaceful and productive driving done.




Sadly, as we buckled her in the carseat she opened her eyes for an instant and caught sight of her big blue Wiggles backpack. Her eyes lit up, and that was the end of the sleep, the peace, the productiveness and all our plans. Basically she didn't sleep at all yesterday, and by hour two we had already:
1) revoked her Toddler of the Year Award
2) confiscated her previously-held Baby of the Year Award
and
3) awarded her the Bad Baby of the Day Award

Lots of yowling, lots of demands to eat (and eat), lots of demands for Wiggles and attention, and lots of endless plains. With some picturesque mountains in the background... but honestly they were powerless against Berry.

Thanks to faulty Twilight-Zonesque GPS directions we very, very nearly ran out of petrol in the middle of nowhere. We were saved when we magically stumbled upon a single petrol pump, a tiny store and an "artistic taxidermy" stand by the side of the road. Picture proof below:




Anyway, I didn't mean to interrupt my endless whinge with some facts.

We're in Tramont, Utah now. Dad (Evans) was sorely disappointed to find that the Denny's (this town's best dining establishment) didn't serve beer, and Tomas was sorely disappointed to find the Denny's didn't serve margaritas. Paula says Utah doesn't have wine at all because (and I quote): "They hate women"*. Tramont, apart from being probably misspelled by me,** is the kind of place that plunges me into a tractor- and heavy-agricultural-machinery- inspired instant depression. I got that creeping Boonah kind of sadness coming over me as we drove down the main street (my family knows I mean....).

[*Paula said it, not me.]
[**I think it's actually something like Tremonton. Aw, shucks.]




We are trying to be even more ambitious today, with 600+ miles as the goal. We're trying to reach Pueblo, Colorado by nightfall. We're setting off early-early again (although I think 6.30 is a poor excuse for "early" and would prefer to leave at 4am... but I'm outnumbered here). Paula, who patiently sat next to Berry throughout a fair proportion of her shenanigans yesterday, has buried the blue Wiggles backpack deep beneath the rest of the luggage and forbidden anyone to mention them. Which is fair enough.

Last day

We spent one last day in Seattle with Dad and Tomas, before the big trek. The Pacific Northwest is our kind of place, and it's hard to leave when we've loved living here so much. We count ourselves incredibly lucky that we ended up here after the hurricane.

We went one last time to the University District (Nathan spent a year at UW during undergrad, so we hit some of his old haunts again). We took Berry one last time to The Land of Nod, pretty much her favourite place in the world. We took Tomas to the very first Starbucks, and we went, of course, to Pike Place Market. There was a street festival going on down by the markets, a very sunshine-y afternoon with lots of "unique" people (the kind only Seattle can produce) in the crowd doing some mighty crazy dances. One stand-out: an old man with a beard, wearing a fedora, a tutu and random streamers of tulle... Berry was transfixed.

Yeah, we'll miss it here.

On the move

I like moving.

I must like moving, because I don't like staying still. I don't like to know where I'll be living for too long. I love seeing new places and settling into new houses and meeting new people. I get sentimental about leaving – but on the whole, moving around is my thing.

But oh, how I loathe the packing. It's a special secret torture that we inflict on ourselves, and as a girl who's moved nine times in the past ten years, I can say with some authority that doing it frequently doesn't make it any easier.

So between packing and organising and cleaning and toddler-wrangling and reorganising and working and out-processing and planning (not to mention more packing) May has been a long, long, looooong month. I am not sorry to see the back of it.

Packing

If only this were all we needed to fit in the Penske truck....

A billion boxes

I think our possessions are multiplying while we sleep.

We are not people who keep very many things. Seriously. I used to be, but Nathan has a disorder (I'm sure it's a disorder) that gives him irresistible urges to throw things away... all the time. So we're not pack rats, hoarders, or people who like to have "stuff".

So why is it that every time I go to bed feeling I've just packed half the house into boxes, I wake up to a new reality: there are a billion boxes left to go.

I have a theory, but since it involves mischievous elves and nefarious plots I'll keep it to myself. There's no need to sound insane.