June 29th, 2011 Blog #1

It was approximately 7:30 in the morning on January 2, 2007, when my dad walked into the bedroom that my sister and I shared. "Time to get up. We are going to storage to get our bags and moving to California today." he said in a matter-of-fact voice. My sister and I were still too tired to really process this new information. We lived in Vermont at this time and had lived there for most of our lives. We spent the day packing just our clothes and a few necessities and left the next morning without having a chance to say goodbye to our friends. We drove for three days in our fifteen passenger van without stopping, just my parents, three younger sisters and me. Dad drove the whole time. I remember when it was my turn to sit in the front seat and read the map to dad, it was so hard to stay awake. Driving cross-country in the winter is not something I would suggest. The wind is really strong when going through farmland. It is flat for miles. The Rockies are even worse. It got so bad driving through one day that we had to pull off the interstate and stay the night in a hotel. Us girls did not mind at all because we finally got to shower and sleep in a bed! We stopped over night at my brother's house in Utah and got to California on Sunday the 7th, the day before my seventeenth birthday. Needless to say it was not the kind of birthday I was planning on having that year. We moved from a nice, two story, four bedroom house in Stowe, Vermont to a two bedroom apartment in Folsom, California. It was beautiful there though! Back in Vermont there was still two feet of snow but in California it was spring. We only lived there for three months before we moved back east to Massachusetts. California was fun while it lasted. It was actually part of the reason why I moved to Branson, Missouri in 2008 but that is another story.