Due West: Day-1

On Tuesday of last week Mike, Addie and I said goodbye to The Box and headed west (by car) to Palo Alto, California where we will be living for the summer. (In response to some of your confused texts and voicemails, yes I did mean the state of California, and no I was not kidding when I said we drove all the way there.)
Our westwardly adventures started Tuesday afternoon… In true Bucy fashion we were running a bit late (about 58 hours late to be exact) but who in the world is counting, right??? The original plan was to drive through Tennessee and Alabama, across the northern part of Texas, through Albuquerque, NM and then up to Palo Alto via Phoenix, Arizona. The nice thing about road trips, however, is that they can change at the drop of a hat. A couple hours into our trip – I think it was somewhere around the Tennessee state line – we decided to re-route and head south to Mississippi… After a stop in Jackson, it was on to Louisiana, across the southern part of Texas, into New Mexico, Arizona, and finally up the coast of California.
There were points in the trip when I thought we would never make it. There were many more times when I didn’t want our journey to ever end. Here are some pictures and memories to help tell the story of our adventure.


Day-1
Route: Charlottesville, VA – Nashville, TN
Drive Time: 9 hours
Highlights: Ironically, Tuesday was the toughest of our entire trip… I think the fact that both Mike and I had seen a lot of Virginia and eastern-Tennessee beforehand had a lot to do with it, but added to the “typical” were Mike’s stresses over how he did on his last exam, and the fact that most of our drive was in complete darkness. I tried to keep my thoughts to myself, but I was definitely a little worried about how I would ever survive until Sunday!
Things I Learned: Mike would be a terrible criminal. He was so paranoid about lying to the receptionist at our hotel about not having a pet that he hardly slept a wink – prepared to leap out of bed and silence Addie at even the slightest hint of a bark. He made me put her in a suitcase anytime we went in our out of the hotel. He even went back into our room (after check-out) to take the garbage bag from our room trashcan because he thought housekeeping might untie a grocery bag that had some of Addie’s un-eaten, dry dog food inside and reveal our secret.