Day One - Meet The Behemoth!

Ladies and gents, allow me to introduce the umpteenth wonder of the world.....

THE BEHEMOTH.  This thing was HUGE.  We started out with a reservation for a 16 foot moving van which in both of our minds was going to be completely sufficient.  Then we picked it up.  And then we panicked a little.  To be fair, I mostly panicked and John had misgivings.  Thankfully, the moving place had the next size up available, a 22 foot monstrosity that runs on diesel and had us feeling like truckers who could crush puny cars in our wake.  Perfect.  The movers arrived on schedule after we hurriedly switched out the vans, and spent two and a half hours packing us up.  We had about 5 feet of space leftover at the back of the truck and everything else was packed to the rafters.  See us breathe huge sighs of relief.

After the truck was packed John navigated it over to All For Doggies and we retrieved a very happy to see us and relieved not have been left behind dog who squealed and leapt with excitement once she spotted us.  It took her an hour or so to get used to riding in the van, but once we were on the highway and cruising along she settled in and passed out.  

An uneventful trip to Des Moines for our first day.  John and I tried to call the truck by various names, the Conestoga, etc. that would go with our Manifest Destiny theme, but we just couldn't call it anything but The Behemoth.  Took us a little longer than we expected, but we didn't mind so much.  Stops for gas and then a longer one to eat our ham sandwiches at an I-80 rest stop.  We saw about what you'd expect along the way; loads of cows and fields, neat and orderly working farms and crumbling abandoned ones, including one so far gone that a full size tree had grown out of its grain silo, and the obligatory small, squashed mammals along the highway shoulder.  After about seven hours of driving we stopped for the night which required John to park The Behemoth in a hotel lot where our only option was to parallel park across five spaces.  For a guy with a week old driver's license he did an amazing job.  Punk slept on the king size bed with us, which she LOVED, and we all passed out as soon as we hit the bed.