When I arrived at the house, there was quite simply a staggering amount of work left to be done. My wife had done a lot, including renting our house and coordinating all the movers while working a full time job. However, there was a ton of cleaning to do and besides the major furniture being missing, there was pretty much all of the smaller items to pack and things to trash. Since we were moving into a house that was roughly half the size of our previous, there was just a lot to get rid of.

I personally made 4 car-full trips to Goodwill and 5 “after midnight” runs to nearby apartment complex dumpsters to discard of old mail, refrigerator items and miscellaneous crap.

That first night, i think the two of us slept a combined 3 hours. In all, we did about 20 hours of work in the house cleaning it up over a full day. To put that in perspective – we spent as much time cleaning in 1 day as it took for us to drive from Phoenix to Salem in 3 days (20 hours).

Once we got on the road things got a little easier. We weren’t running around cleaning things, but we were stuck inside a confined space for 3 days with 2 dogs and probably a fourth of our belongings. The drive from Phoenix to Salem took us across the state of Arizona, through Palm Springs and onto Los Angeles, then north through Bakersfield, Sacramento and Redding into southern Oregon, crossing Medford, Ashland, Eugene and finally Salem. 20 hours and 1000 miles later, we pulled up to our new rental house and immediately unloaded the car as we had about 2 hours to return our rental car.

Right now we are ALL relaxing (our dogs curled up on the floor next to us as we lay down in the only real furniture in the house, a window seat in the living room). The days ahead will still be busy, but less stressed as we can now move in at our own pace.

It feels good to rest.

Obviously, i am super excited about the move. For one, I missed my wife and over the past month and a half have felt more like a vacationer up here in Salem than an actual resident. Then there are my dogs. With the passing of my cat, its been pretty lonely. You never really know how much pets enhance your life until you lose one, or are separated from them. I have often wondered if they would miss me, or forget who I was. I guess i’ll find out next Friday when I see them. Really, i can’t wait to just let them maul me when i walk into the door.

It is going to be a little strange seeing my house totally empty. When i left it, it was full of our crap!

Get to grab the keys to the new place tomorrow evening, and that should be cool. We’ll have electricity, gas, water and all the utilities minus internet there. Maybe i should get that set up now? Still have my work furnished apartment for another 2 weeks so there isn’t a huge hurry.

Once Kelly gets here and we start to explore Oregon I am going to make this site (or some other site, i haven’t decided) more visual with pics and stuff.