So we just “settled” into our new home state for the next three years. When I say settled, I mean we arrived with what we boarded the plane with, our dogs and 8 pieces of luggage, the rest of our household goods we will see sometime in December and we’re on the hunt for suitable housing. We left our home state of Hawaii and spent four days literally driving across the mainland United States to get to our new home of record. Not only are we getting used to an entirely new state, new people, new culture, and holy crap new speed limits, but oy the weather (for Hawaii people the hardest and most obvious difference is going to be the weather, especially in November, there are seasons??? WHHHAAAAAAATT!!!) 

Why in the world would we make life hard for ourselves by driving cross country you ask? Refer back to the part where I said we have dogs. Thanks to all of the hoopla all legacy carriers have undergone in the last year or so, airliners are now making it even harder for families to remain together with their four legged loved ones, this becomes even harder when you are required to move every three years or so, because your pets are as much of a commitment as your children. The only air carrier that would allow us to fly our boxers as excess baggage was Hawaiian Air…but in the summer and fall months, they only fly pets to the west coast and our final stop was in the southeast. Taking a long hard look at the costs and options, we did the only thing responsible pet parents could do, we shipped our car to LA, rented a U-haul trailer for the bags and decided to make the 3.5 day drive since we were not willing to leave our dogs behind.

On paper (aka Google Maps) the drive is supposed to be a little over two days. But of course that “travel time” is without stopping for gas, the bathroom (for humans and dogs), taking wrong turns, and sleeping. Hence we figured it would take us about 3 and a half days. As you can see from the pic, at least some of us were able to catch lots of z’s on our 3-4 day journey.

We survived without killing each other or gassing each other out too badly..and we all kept each other warm in the back of the car. Now that we’ve reached our destination we gotta work on not killing each other in the one bedroom hotel room that has been “home” for about a month while we wait for our house. At least now we know as a trial run we could all possibly live the RV life if we had to…