i'm not sure if you all realize this, but taking a 2 day road trip with a moving truck, dog and 15 month old is quite exhausting... kai caught a cold just before we moved, so she was a bit fussy on the ride... but did way better than we could have imagined! unfortunately for the blog and our fuzzy memories down the road, we didn't get many pictures of the trip... and the strangest thing happened... i took a couple of pictures at 'the thing' in eastern arizona and when we got here and settled in, i couldn't find the memory card that was in my camera.... very eerie!

so about the move: we signed our house over on monday morning and ran a few errands and hit the road. we made it to midland by about 7 pm and thought, it's still daylight out, let's keep going... not sure if you know it, but there's hardly more than some desert brush, truck stops and cheap motels between midland and el paso... so we kept trucking all the way to texas' finest city - el paso - we arrived around 2:30 am and were pooped but didn't have as far to go on tuesday, so it worked out well. we got to our new apartment sometime tuesday afternoon and shawn didn't sit down until he unloaded the truck (mostly by himself!) we spent the first week here shopping for some odds and ends and driving lots of neighborhoods! more on our time in phoenix later...

before we made the semi-cross-country journey, we had the chance to say goodbye to many good friends... unfortunately, we don't have many pics... but here is kai with kari and rob a couple of days before we left i-town - we miss them so much!


uncle rob had fun pushing kai in her homemade diaper box car racer!

kai also made sure to share lots of love with kari

we also spent lots of time with our dear neighbor louise... kai loved going over to visit susie, louise's doggie



annie and noli came over just before we hit the road and why i didn't get any pictures of us all together i don't know... but annie was kind enough to take one last family photo in front of our first house for us


like i said, we didn't get many pictures on the road - mostly because gas stations and mcdonald's look pretty much the same in every town... we did stop at the first mile marker in arizona and snapped some first photos




and i caught this video of kai dancing in the car

and pretty soon we were here... our new temporary home - sorry we don't have pictures of the inside... it's your pretty standard apartment and quite frankly, our decorating is a bit embarrassing for now...



we are looking forward to hanging out with old friends and meeting lots of new ones!



next post - our second family trip to southern california!