It’s been a busy month of June! At the beginning of the month, we announced our upcoming move and Dave’s job offer. After that, blogging took a backseat as we began tying up loose ends from our temporary life in Nashville, which included saying farewell to many friends, finishing up my time working at REI, and organizing our stuff for the move.
On June 15, we hit the road with our car loaded to the max. Dave’s company is covering the cost of professional movers, which is awesome, but it still might be a few weeks before they can get our stuff to us. But we didn’t want to wait for him to start work, since it had already been about six weeks since he had started the conversation with Neptune about coming back. So we put our “essentials” in the car (which shouldn’t really be that hard since we lived out of six panniers for two years, but alas, it was a challenge!), and we headed south to Alabama. Dave started work on June 16, but our rental house in Montgomery wasn’t going to be ready until a few days after that. My sister and her husband kindly opened their guest room and we spent a few nights with them in Opelika. On Wednesday, our house was ready, so we made the move into our new, empty space. We came prepared with our camping gear and spent the first two nights on our sleeping pads, which actually was kind of fun and reminiscent of the Tour (even though we were indoors!).
That weekend, we went back to Opelika and borrowed my brother-in-law’s truck to haul a bed and washer and dryer to our new house. On Saturday, while we still had the truck, we picked up some couches we bought from Craigslist. So now our house is not QUITE as empty as before! Here are a few shots to show you our new place:
Our home for at least the next year!
Our backyard… please note that Dave has already hung up clothesline for me–which is perfect with this Alabama sunshine!
This house is much smaller than our home in Auburn was, which is completely fine for us since we did a lot of downsizing before leaving on the Tour. But I must admit, I was spoiled by our huge kitchen we had before. So far, we’re only using our camping cook kit, so it’s not a problem. But I’m anticipating some challenges with storage once all our kitchen boxes arrive!
Our new kitchen!
Our living room… that “coffee table” is our camping storage bin. Multi-functional! And yes, our bikes are parked behind the couch!
Suitcases serving as our dressers in the master bedroom.
We’re using our spare bed in the guest bedroom until our bedroom furniture arrives from Nashville.
And… perhaps one of the highlights of our new home… we also picked up my cat! My sister was kind enough to “cat-sit” for what has now been THREE YEARS! But now that we have our own place, Chewy came back to live with me and Dave. He’s still adjusting to his new home, but it’s been nice having him around to keep things lively!
For any of you who might have met Chewy before, you might be thinking he looks smaller… we got him a buzz cut because his super long hair gets terribly matted, especially in the summer. Don’t worry, he’ll be back to his normal fluffy self in no time!
And as far as work goes, Dave has enjoyed diving back in at Neptune. He’s catching up on what he missed for the last few years, though already he feels like he’s way ahead of the learning curve as far as starting a new job. Neptune has some exciting projects that he’ll be working on in coming months, and Dave is looking forward to really using all his engineering skills again. He’s also enjoyed reacquainting with some of his favorite co-workers from before.
So, that’s the update for now! More to come in the days and weeks ahead as we settle into our new life.
