Dinner with Hernan...

Last Thursday night we picked up Hernan and had dinner in Salt Lake. We went to one of Patrick's favorite restaurants and got a meat-lovers pizza and it was extra cheesy and good. Then we went to temple square to see a project that Hernan worked on when he was an intern for the church. He helped to take pictures inside the temple that were used to create a model so visitors would know what it looks like. It was pretty cool. We also walked around the new mega mall.

 

igougo.com

Apartment Tour...

I tried to include this on my last post but I couldn't get it to work right. But thanks to Hernan I learned how to post a video to the blog!

This is a tour of our new apartment before we moved all of our things inside.

More apartment...

We've settled in quite nicely and are enjoying our new place. There have only been a couple of things that we didn't really care for, but we've fixed both of them.

The shower curtain bar is oddly placed. In the shower one of your shoulders will touch the tile or the lovely safety bar and the other will be against the curtain liner. This is kinda gross and made us feel like we didn't have enough room. The bar is also placed low so the liner would pool at the bottom of the tub. We thought this could be manageable now since we have a new curtain liner, but after a little while when the liner starts to get a little dirty it could be really bad. So a trip to Home Depot fixed that. I bought a new rod, the kind that you twist, and it has made showering so much better! Who would've thought that shower curtain rod placement is so important.

The other thing that is a little different is that the carpet gets dirty super fast. The carpet is low and blue, and also found in some church buildings. I found that I'd vacuum it and later that day it'd look dirty again. In this apartment our front door is outside and we're used to it being enclosed in the building. We already had a rug inside the door so we bought a new outside rug. This fixed the dirty carpet issue and adds color to our front door area.

We made it!

 After driving 1,700 miles through Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wyoming we made it to Utah on Sunday night! We were so excited to have finished the drive. We originally planned on arriving around noontime on Monday but changed our minds. We realized we might want a little time to relax on Monday after unpacking the truck before the week really started. So we spent Sunday night in a hotel, because we could not check into the apartment, and grabbed some Mexican food before calling it a night.

Unloading the moving truck on Monday went well. Patrick and I unpacked about half of the truck when a couple of neighbors started helping us. This made things go much faster and was awesome since that half of the truck was packed pretty densely. We quickly realized that all of our things would not fit and so our desk and white dresser from our old kitchen are currently residing on our balcony.We hope to sell them soon.

We finished unpacking and putting things away on Wednesday night and are pretty happy with how things are. We still have too much for the size apartment we have but are learning to deal with it. In the old apartment there was a large closet we put a lot in and this time we are using the study or second bedroom as a closet room. It's really packed but there's a built in desk that Patrick will use which is nice.

Patrick's been busy this week with orientation which will carry over into next week. I've spent the week organizing our apartment and job hunting. Later today Danielle and Chad will visit us for the weekend!

This is our new apartment building. We are on the ground floor second from the left. The shade from the large tree is helping us get through the hot days without air conditioning.

This building is one of my favorite things about living in this apartment complex so far. It's right next to us. The first good thing about it is it houses the mailboxes. Getting the mail is one of my favorite things to do everyday. The second is that it's the laundry building. Earlier this week I was able to do five loads of laundry all at once!

This cupboard in the kitchen is another one of my favorite things about living in this apartment. There's enough space to lay the spices down so now we are super organized.

We are so excited to be in Utah and for Patrick to start MBA school later in the month! 

Day two of driving...

Last night we drove a little past Lincoln, Nebraska. We planned on stopping for the night in Lincoln but all of the hotels in our price range looked runned down, kinda unsafe, and like we might get bed bugs. So we drove on and stopped at a Super 8 a few miles off of the highway. It was very clean, quiet, and had a soft mattress.

Today's drive been going well. We left the hotel at 5:30. I've had a few naps and Patrick's been driving the whole time. We've seen lots of cows and some llamas. At one of our last stops we saw an interesting looking restaurant. Here's a picture of it. Patrick's not the only Mexican Irish man out there. Apparently blending the two styles of food is working here in Nebraska.

We calculated how many miles per gallon we're getting and it's a whopping 9 ! We plan on making it to Provo tonight. Just ten hours to go!

Ashy's turn...

After driving 7 1/2 hours, ashley decided that I was done driving and that it was her turn.

We have driven 427.3 miles with a trip top speed of 71 miles per hour. We're somewhere in illinois and have another 370 miles of driving left today. We are actually doing better then expected.

Roadtrip breakfast...

Patrick and I headed out shortly after 5 this morning to Utah. Here we are enjoying breakfast. Really though we did each have half a muffin, although the muffin was white chocolate raspberry. We've also opened all of our snacks and candy to sample them.