A Very Tall (But True) Tale...And Our New Home!!

The story I am about to tell you may seem unlikely, but I am here to tell you that the series of unfortunate events which occured on our drive from Utah to Missouri really did happen!! However crazy it was, we did make it to Missouri and to our beautiful home!!! And so far we are really loving it here :) Pictures of our house are later in this post. But, now our crazy adventure must be documented...

It all began several days before we were scheduled to head out of Utah.  Ryan had taken our small car to the Hyundai dealership to get the oil changed.  So, naturally we thought we were going to have our car back in a few hours. However, this is where our first major catastrophe occurred.   The dealership noticed a recall on the power steering and decided to take care of that for us.  Though their intentions were pure...something went awry and not only did the power steering no longer work...but the car itself was not working either.  They told us it was going to take awhile to get the part in that they needed to fix it.  However, this would have set us behind in our travels and we wouldn't have been in Missouri to retrieve our household goods when the movers delivered it.  SO, we needed another plan.

The bright spot in this tale is that the dealership was super kind and helpful and came up with a plan to help us out.  They paid for a Uhaul for us to tow behind our large car. This was kind of a lucky break for me, because it allowed Ryan to drive in the same car as me which was ideal for many reasons...that I am sure you can figure out for yourself :)

So after loading up our nifty Uhaul trailer, cleaning the house and saying our goodbyes, it was time for another epic drive to commence. For 3 hours all was going well.  I was managing to keep the kids entertained and happy and we were making good time.  Then....we stopped for lunch and Ryan noticed  the tire on our trailer had a chunk out of it and needed to be fixed.  This little snag cost us three hours of drive time!!! Yes, it took Uhaul 3 hours to fix our tire :( We walked around the store of the parking lot we were stuck in about 5 times, watched a movie and ate some dinner. By the time we were finally able to leave the kids were tired and grumpy and ready to be done for the day.  But, Ryan wanted to get a little bit more driving in...being the hard core traveler he is!!

So, with as positive an attitude we could muster,  we were off, hoping to make up for some of the time we had lost.  Our next unfortunate set back occurred 15 minutes later when we were stopped dead in our tracks by a traffic jam caused by a semi truck that had been tipped over  and was blocking ALL lanes of traffic in both directions!!!  Ugh...So it seemed we were in for another long set back.  This is when we had to get inventive.  We weren't moving at all, so we let the kids get out of their seat belts and shimmy about the car.  Elsie, particularly found this to be quite amusing.  She loved to sit in the front seat with daddy and explore all the buttons and knobs at her disposal.

After an hour of waiting with nothing happening to clear up the mess on the freeway, Ryan decided to take matters into his own hands. To the side of the freeway there was a fallen, wire fence. Just beyond the poorly constructed fence and over a small field was a dirt road.  My crazy husband decided to take a chance on that road. So off we drove, over the fallen fence, through a small ditch and through the field to the dirt road.  I breathed a sigh of relief once we made it to the road... only to realize that we were heading on the dirt road up into the mountains.  Ryan's GPS was saying the road would lead us to a freeway entrance ahead...however, I was feeling like we were just getting more and more lost. And I was bracing myself to need to make camp in those mountains for the night...

To my relief, after going down some uncomfortably steep, dirt roads and after several fervent prayers...we made it to the freeway.  We all laughed and cheered once we realized we had actually made it!!! And because everyone else was still stuck behind the fallen semi, we had he freeway completely to ourselves- haha!!!  We ended up getting in some more good drive time and drove through some beautiful Colorado canyons. Once e made it to the hotel, we all slept very well that night :)

The next day, we did some hard core traveling that was luckily uninterrupted!! And we made it to our new house in Missouri at 10 pm and again...slept well that night :)

Now that we are here, we are really loving our house!! We feel so blessed to be in such a beautiful, comfortable home in such a wonderful neighborhood!! Here is our family room!! I love the tall ceilings and the large windows! Our house in Cali always felt so cave like to me.  This room has been the happiest, brightest and most un cave like room I could imagine :)  It is so nice to lay on the couch and watch the pretty clouds float past!

This is a view of our entry way from the office. This entrance has tall ceilings as well which I love!!

The view out our front window is so lovely. You can't tell from this picture, but there is a small lake right across the street that is so so pretty.

Here is the office!!

The dining room...

I LOVE cooking in this kitchen...I feel so so lucky!!

I saw some spiders crawl on this piano in Cali and was too afraid to really play it much...I know I'm lame and silly. But, here I play it all the time :)

Here is our bedroom. We still want to paint this room a light grey...but for now I still love it. I am a fan of color so this room makes me happy :) Ryan painted our bed this fin orange for me!!

And he painted this dresser for me!! This guy really has some major DIY skills!!

He made this toy bench that is in our family room as well...amazing right?!

Ryan and I painted this 18 foot tall wall this fun green to add some much needed color to the room.

Beckham's super hero room!

Ryan added the cool super hero embellishments on Beckham's bed!!

The landing upstairs

We painted the green wall all the way upstairs too! It as a lot of work but so worth it.

Elsie's very first full room!!

We painted her whole room white from the brown it originally was and I added the fun polka dots...painted by hand :)

I wish the picture wasn't so dark :( but Jane's owl room is darling as well with pink and purple stripes...also painstakingly done by myself!

Here is the staircase- I love the railing so much :)

We went with a yellow and green color scheme to add color to all the brown...

This will give you a good idea how tall this darn wall was that we painted!!!

There is still a lot we want to do to the house.  There is a 1500 square foot basement we are already in the process of finishing. And we are also in the process of landscaping our yard and I have a lot of inside projects that might need to wait until furtherer down the road.  We are super excited to have this lovely home and to make it our own :)