The Roller Coaster Month.

I know it's been over a month since my last update, but I haven't had an internet connection at home.  We made it to Florida.  It was a day later than I originally thought, but we arrived in one piece.  We have had great days and not-so-great days.  We have had emotional breakdowns, and emotional triumphs.  We have had good family experiences and crummy ones.  All in all, it's been one heck of a roller coaster month.

We started our journey to Florida on 8/12.  We left our home of 4 years and loaded up the 22' Penske truck (that we only filled 2/3 of the way full, so didn't need a truck that huge anyway, but I'm a bonehead and wouldn't listen when people told me otherwise, but I digress) with the car on a dolly, and, after crying with my parents, hit the road.  Let me start by saying our kids were amazing during the entire trip.  Sure there was some fighting over who would ride with Daddy in the truck with the a/c (the a/c broke in our van shortly before we left.  Stupid Devil trying to discourage us from moving.), but they never asked if we were there yet.  We got to the border of Wisconsin and Illinois and got stopped for more than 2 hours due to an accident about 5 miles in front of us.  I literally had the truck parked in the middle of I39.  This caused us to miss out on hanging out with some friends in IL that night and later down the road near Nashville.  This was the least of our concerns.

The next day I got a call from 1-800-FLOWERS saying they think someone stole my identity.  I looked up my checking account and, sure enough, someone got ahold of my check card and tried to buy flowers and some stuff from Bed Bath and Beyond.  It was a big pain in the butt.  I couldn't use my check card to buy diesel for the rest of the trip.  

After an extra hotel night we arrived at our home in Clearwater, Florida.  We started moving our stuff in to our place and discovered COCKROACHES...a lot of cockroaches.  For the first few nights we were killing 6-10 per night.  This is where the breakdowns started.  I was ticked off that people weren't clean enough next to us to keep them away.  After a couple spraying and baiting treatments we have them under control.  We're only seeing 1 or 2 every couple of days.

Now for the good news... Jolene's family has been awesome.  These are cousins that we don't really know.  Jolene hadn't seen them in close to 20 years, but they welcomed us with open arms.  They have had us over for barbecues, fixed our van's a/c, taken us out for dinner and taken us out to do some touristy-type things. Thanks to you all for welcoming me in to the family.

After the breakdowns of the first couple days we took a drive to Clearwater Beach and Pier 60.  That is my new favorite place on Earth.  The beach is awesome.  There are shops everywhere and cool restaurants. (Hulk) Hogan's Beach Shop is there.  One of the cool things is every Friday and Saturday night they play a family movie in the park by the beach.  It's awesome.

Sometimes God brings you through the roaches so he can show you how awesome paradise is.