Going, going… back, back… to Cali, Cali.

We are now unpacked and moved in. The new place still needs some of our paintings and photos placed on the walls, but the move is, for all intensive purposes, complete. It’s been a crazy few days since we left the beautiful state of Washington and drove into the blazing heat of Southern California. I’ll give you a quick recap of our trip down to La-La land…

The envoy headed out Saturday morning at 6AM from the Gas Station in Bothell, WA, heading south to “The 5”, as the locals down here call it, and onto our destination. The caravan consisted of two vehicles. I was supposed to be able to take the first sleep shift, riding shotgun in the car with Jenny driving and her mom in the back seat with Nate Newton (our pug dog named Gatsby, referred to here as Nate Newton in honor of Goose). Our dads (Al and Paul) were in the moving truck (16 footer, 32 gallon tank getting 12 MPG highway). I say “supposed to” because Jenny and her mom started yapping about God’s knows what, listening to NPR at decibels heard through my iPod headphones. Rule #2, “women ruin everything” was in effect just minutes into our adventure.


The plan was to drive down through Oregon and into California, stopping minimally for only the necessities (bathroom for the pug dog or the women, see Rule #2), and arriving in Fresno at Jenny’s Aunt Gretchen’s for late night lasagna. Our ETA was 14 hours, according to Google Maps, but we ran into some problems along the way.

Another reason to hate the Ducks (as if you needed one)… Duck Traffic. My razor-sharp observations skills noticed an increasing amount of green and yellow adorned vehicles traveling along “The 5” this moving morning. It was between 10AM and 12PM in Central Oregon… I immediately realized that the University of Oregon was playing its home opener that same afternoon. The traffic delayed our trip by approximately 2 hours. Needless-to-say, my hatred for the Ducks almost forced me to pull over and put little Gatsby’s purple and gold Husky coat on and yell obscenities. But we were in enemy territory. Plus, it was about 99 degrees outside, and as we all know, Nate Newton tends to overheat fairly easily.


A lengthy lunch break at a rest stop just across the Oregon border into Northern California also probably added another 30 minutes to our journey. So instead of arriving at 9PM in Fresno… we rolled in about 12:30AM. Gatsby then promptly overheated playing with Aunt Gretchen’s two dogs, and we had reheated lasagna in the early morning.

After sleeping in and grabbing a quick breakfast, we left Fresno and arrived in Pasadena around 3PM, learning from our mistakes and making great time this second day of travel. Although it was almost unbearably hot when we rolled in, reaching 105 degrees Fahrenheit on the hottest weekend of the Summer for the Los Angeles area. This made the unpacking of the truck pretty fun. But our new place has a pool that our group of vagabonds – including both sets of parents (my mom had flown down previous to our arrival), my cousin Joy and her 3 kids, and my friend KT (who also moved frhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifom Seattle this Summer to get his PhD in counseling at the same school I’ll be finishing my degree) – partook in after the job was done. Here is a quick picture of the pool at night.

It is now Friday morning. The temperature yesterday “cooled” down to the low to mid 80’s and apparently should stay that way for the next 6 to 8 months. So I got that going for me. We took Gatsby to the dog park the other night and have our “accent walls” (again, see Rule #2) painted and boxes all unpacked. I’ve learned that women can’t have too many storage bins for organizing. So much so that as we drove by The Container Store today, Jenny became visibly excited and I knew about 100 bucks was going to be dropped there within the week.


But school starts in almost 3 weeks, when my life will then consist of four 4-credit classes, including a class called Film and Theology. I’m kind of looking forward to the studies. But at the same time dreading the thought of being a full-time school again. I’ll survive though, clinging to the fact that I don’t have to have a job for the next 9 months. Oh, and did I mention it’s going to be in the 80’s for the next 6 to 8 months?