Day One – Joplin, Missouri

Today we are officially “homeless”. We loaded all of our belongings onto the moving truck and we returned the house keys back to our landlord.

Nearly everything went smoothly. The Bogert family arrived with their tractor-trailer in the morning, and with their help and the help of my parents and many friends, all the furniture and boxes were carefully and tightly packed onto the truck.

If you’re into packing, like my dad, you’ll be interested to see that even the car was put on the trailer.

Moving is just not something you do by yourself. You need the help of others, and we were blessed to have so many lend a hand to us today.

I said “nearly” everything went smoothly. The only mishap occurred when I neglected to properly secure the lid to the car-top carrier on our Suburban. As my mom was driving north on I-35 to drop off our kids at a friend's house, the lid opened up and luggage began flying off the car onto the highway. Another driver signaled to her the problem, and no sooner had she pulled over to see what was wrong when another driver pulled over with the lost luggage he had picked up for her.

Thanks to the kindness of these people, my mom not only pulled over before more luggage was lost, but she also recovered the two that had flown off the car. Thanks to the goodness of God, the flying bags didn’t cause an accident. A potential disaster was averted.

It was a good lesson to learn. I think I’ll be extra careful in securing it for the rest of the trip. Otherwise, we may have left a trail of underwear and socks on the highways up to Alaska. Someone mentioned that at least that would have made it easy to find our way back.

We covered 257 miles today. Robyn pointed out that we were already 1/20^th of the way there!