The First 900 Miles

Well...if I had to sum up the last two days in a word, it would have to be over-the-top!

A quick recap of the last two days:

• We moved out of our house.
• We drove 900+ miles.
• Andy had a preliminary phone interview for a job and scheduled two interviews (one is a second phone interview with the same school for tomorrow)!!
• We sold our house!!
• We visited an old friend that we hadn't seen in 6+ years.

As you can imagine, the last two days have felt more like three or four. It's hard to believe that yesterday morning we woke up in our Indianapolis house and this evening, we are 900 miles away in Mitchell, SD and have sold that house!

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Tuesday, June 21st
So, after the movers came and took away all of our stuff, we left Indy around 3 pm yesterday and decided to drive west and see where we ended up. We drove past numerous flat corn fields and blew past our initial goal of Bloomington, IL. At some point while I was driving, our realtor left us a message letting us know we had gotten an offer on our house!! So we decided to stop for the night in the college town of Iowa City, where we knew we would have internet access. We faxed our counter offer back and went to bed.

Corn field in Illinois

Wednesday, June 22nd

From Iowa City, we headed off to Des Moines to meet up with my friend Sarah [we met in college at Environmental Science Field Camp in Montana.] She suggested meeting at La Mie for coffee and yummy pastries. If you are ever in Des Moines, we highly recommend this place. We drove onto Ledges State Park, which numerous websites claimed to be the best hiking in Iowa. We didn't explore the whole park, but for Iowans sake, I really hope that this is not the best hiking that Iowa has to offer. I must say that it was really nice to stretch our legs and hike around though. While on our short jaunt, we got the call about the second counter offer, and we decided to take it! Hurray for only owning one house!!

Cool-looking barn in Iowa

Andy and Ramona enjoying Iowa's best hiking

We stopped for the night in Mitchell, SD, the home of the world's only "corn palace". Andy, Mike, Ryan, and I actually stopped at the corn palace on our drive out to Seattle the first time. Let's just say we were underwhelmed. There was surprisingly little corn and it wasn't all that palace-like.

Tomorrow, it's onto the Black Hills and some more hiking!