Travel Plans

As most of you know, Joe has accepted a new position with Cummins at the PACCAR Technical Center in Washington. He has been living in a furnished place is Bellingham since Febuary 28. On Thursday, March 24 he will be flying back to Charleston to begin our official move to the West Coast. The movers will pack up our things on Thursday and load the truck on Friday. We will load up my Volvo S60 with a months worth of essential belongings, our dog Chance & the laptop.

Saturday our journey begins. We are taking 9 days to drive 3,000+ miles across the country. This is our current plan, which could all change once we're on the road, but here's the gist:

Saturday March 26
Summerville, SC - Memphis, TN=12 hours
Lunch in Atlanta
Dinner in Memphis
Hotel in Memphis

Sunday March 27
Memphis, TN - Amarillo, TX=12 hours
Lunch in Fort Smith, AR?
Hotel in Amarillo

Monday March 28
Amarillo, TX - Flagstaff, AR=9.5 hours
Lunch in Alberquerque, NM
Hotel in Flagstaff

Tuesday March 29
hike Grand Canyon
Hotel in Flagstaff?

Wednesday March 30
Flagstaff, AR - Bakersfield, CA=7.75 hours
Hotel in Bakersfield

Thursday March 31
Bakersfield, CA - San Francisco, CA=7.25 hours
Drive Hwy 1 along coastline (maybe not due to road closer with landslides)
Lunch in Carmel or Monterey
17 Mile Drive by Pebble Beach
Stay in San Francisco

Friday April 1
explore San Francisco
stay in San Francisco or Napa Valley or Sonoma?

Saturday April 2
San Francisco, CA - Eugene, OR=9 hours
Hotel in Eugene

Sunday April 3
Eugene, OR - Bellingham, WA=6.5 hours
stay at our temporary furnished home in Bellingham safe & sound

I'm sure we will find many things along the way to stop and see which we will post and blog about each day. We are extremely excited to begin this new adventure in our lives.

Keep us in your prayers over the next few weeks. It's a great leap of faith to leave the security of family, friends and 2 steady incomes, to move somewhere that is supposed to apparently rain a lot :P

We know we'll love the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. We are extremely excited to see all we can in the next few years. (Vancouver, Victoria, Whistler, Alaska, Portland, San Juan Islands, Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, Olympic National Park, Tulip Festival, Pike Place Market, Space Needle, Green Lake, Gasworks Park, Chittenham Locks salmon ladder, Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project, REM Koolhaus' Seattle Central Library, Woodinville Wineries, countless breweries, and much much more). We intend to continue posting our explorations of the west coast on here. I'm sure we will still post most of pictures on Facebook, but on the blog we can tell you all the fun stories and experiences along the way that we didn't capture in film. Stay tuned for more...