Leaving California

So, where were we… right - the truck is loaded and off they go, then off we go. We had to get to Montana before the truck so we spent a couple of nights at Amy’s Mom’s house in Oakland. Kelly is always great and we are so lucky to have supportive Mothers that not only keep us in check but give us their time and energy and support our decisions (most of the time, HA!).

The truck was set to arrive on April 6th so we needed to get out of Dodge because we had a 1.5 drive up to Ennis. Here’s the tricky part. Our car - we only had 1 in California at the time - a Subaru CrossTrek - not exactly a large vehicle had to hold 2 people, Kiki (dog), and our valuable stuff that we couldn’t pack in the moving van. That included important files, jewelry, my shotguns that I inherited from my Father and a bunch of other stuff. The tricky part is where do we stay for the night without having to unload the entire car into a motel room and then load it back up again. At this point I was DONE with packing and moving shit around. Simple solution really, put in a 12 hour day and drive to a small b&b in Rexburg, Idaho where we can park the car without a concern of it getting stolen or broken into. Seems like a minor deal but our entire confidential lives were inside that car! Ok, got it - done! Moving on…

Rexburg to Ennis is only about 3 hours so it was an easy drive in after a long and emotional day before leaving California for the last time as residents.

We arrived at LP Ranch to beautiful weather. We stopped along the way and snapped a few photos of the Welcome to Montana road sign. Seemed appropriate since we were now going to be full time Montanans.

Arriving at the house, like we have so many times before was different. It was familiar, of course, after all we made this house ‘ours’ years ago but this was different. It was no longer just a vacation house, a part time home for our family. It was now our home but we really didn’t understand that yet, not at all as you will see in upcoming blog posts. It felt good but there was a task at hand. We had to prep the garage to absorb our California house belongings for storage until our Bozeman house was completed.

So, Amy and I got busy cleaning out the garage and making sure we could put everything in it’s place in some sort of orderly fashion.

April 3, 2018