On the Road

We at 3:40 this afternoon. It took us about 1 1/2 hours to drive 30 miles to Fredericksburg - oh, we'll miss the DC traffic.

That's the back of our van - we are hauling about 1,000 pounds of stuff. Believe it or not, more went in after I took this picture. Not to mention what went into the Kia.



We're spending the night with our friends Dave and Lisa in Fredericksburg - a short leg, but the first leg of our trip.

Dave was my roommate at Ft. Leavenworth back in 2000, and we've been friends ever since.

He built the bar he's serving Lisa at in this shot. Tonight we're playing pool, drinking beer, and reminiscing. We'll see each other again, but who knows when. All roads lead to DC.

Transformation

Today is the big day - we say goodbye to Virginia and begin our adventure.

A final shot of the den, with a little help from Mr. Woody:



We hand off the keys to the next occupants of this house and start our road trip this afternoon with a quick jaunt down to Fredericksburg, VA. We'll spend the night there with old friends, then up early for the first leg of the trip - heading to Augusta, Georgia, where we'll meet up with more old friends and spend the 4th of July weekend. We've rented cabins on a lake, and we'll be trying out water skiing - something I've never done!

But first, the final cleaning of the old house. Even though it's pretty much empty, there's lots to do before we close the door for the last time!

Boredom

the Wii, Playstation, TV, etc. are all packed up. Non-stop choruses of "I'm bored" have become the theme of this move. Trying to farm the kids out to friends as much as possible for these next few days.

N bouncing a ball off of the boxes this morning, while repeating the kids' mantra.

The truck comes tomorrow to pick up our stuff. Living amongst boxes for one more day. Then the house will be eerily empty. To paraphrase Frost, something there is that doesn't love an empty house.

A New Adventure Begins

Sometimes it's hard to know where to begin a story. Authors like to start from all different points - in the middle (in medias res) and tell backward and forward, at the end and tell backward, or at the chronological beginning. I'm going to start at the beginning of this story because I don't know how it's going to turn out yet. This is going to be the story of my adventure with my family in San Antonio, Texas. Our adventure - The 5 Bonicas.

Life is too short not to live it like an adventure, not to make the mundane into the wonderous.

So this is a prologue of sorts, as I am writing this in my kitchen in Northern Virginia, surrounded by boxes.

The movers came to pack us yesterday. Our house went from looking like this:

to looking like this in about 12 hours:

Our house didn't normally look like the top photo, but we had to pull everything out of our crawl space storage, and it was a lot of stuff. There's a couch and some other furniture buried under it all, too.

The truck comes to load up on Monday, then we have a couple of days to clean up before we hit the road.

This is the road:

Stops in Georgia and Alabama to visit friends, then on to Texas!

So this is the beginning of the adventure - the curtain is coming down on our time in Virginia, but the actors for the next play are already standing in the wings, stage right, waiting for the curtain to rise again.