Let’s take a road trip
Well, it’s been a rousing start to September! The day after I retired from my full-time job, we were up at zero-dark-thirty to catch an early flight for a celebratory weekend and to take in the final IndyCar race of the season. Next, it was time for the final push: Moving the rest of our stuff to our new home in Florida. It’ll be a bit of back and forth for a few months while my husband keeps working, but we’re mostly migrating the rest of our belongings that I didn’t sell, donate or trash. How do we still have so much stuff?
The actual first step in the big move down South took place two years ago. I had decided to sand down, paint and change the hardware on our good, solid-wood bedroom furniture to take it to our new place. It looks terrific! Then, last summer, we packed that bedroom suite along with the guestroom set and a few other things into a U-Haul and headed down the road. We opted to make it a three-day drive since we weren’t in any huge hurry and didn’t want to drive long hours on a marathon trip. We stopped in southern West Virginia one night and Savannah, Ga., the next, which gave us a chance to have a nice dinner in the pretty downtown there. Side note: It was absolutely the most humid night I have ever felt in my life – almost like sitting in a steam room. Once we hit I-95 in Florida, my husband looked at me and said, “You know, this was actually really fun.”
This time around, both of us drove as we took a truck and my car. The stopovers were planned for Huntersville, N.C., and Jacksonville, Fla. One must-do on the list: Buc-ee’s. Have you been to one of these stores or heard of them? It’s like a truck stop meets Cracker Barrel meets Walmart with freshly made food, dozens of gas pumps and the cleanest bathrooms around.
We heard about them and stopped there last summer in Georgia, and it was fantastic. I had heard about the homemade brisket sandwiches, so we tried them, and they were delicious.
Our king mattress, big TV, pictures, wall art and the rest of our clothes have made it to their final destination. Everything was unloaded and dumped into the guestroom, and it looks like a disaster zone. Now, the fun begins trying to figure out where to put everything and how to organize the fall and winter clothes we kept for when we travel back and forth.
I already realize we still have too many photos to hang on the walls of our new, smaller home. Maybe I’ll rotate them every once in a while. What’s nice is that I now have plenty of time to decorate and organize because I don’t have to worry about going to work!
Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.