MOVING TO BHAM

Hello Everyone!!

I have decided to start a blog to keep you all updated with our move and new life in Birmingham, Alabama. I am very excited as I feel this blog has been a long time coming... and now I finally have an interesting subject to talk about (and hopefully a little more time to work on it.)

First I will talk about where we are moving... lots of people are not quite sure where Birmingham is (including myself until recently.) Hence, I have decided to include a map for your review... You can see the big red star is Birmingham. Our new home is 8 hours from Jacksonville, 2.5 hours from Columbus/Phenix City, 2 hours from Atlanta, 7 hours from Gator Country, 10 hours from Dallas, 11 hours from South Florida and yet still a VERY long way away from Minneapolis!!

You may ask why we are making the move to Birmingham? (aka THE HAM as Jessica so lovingly refers to it). Josh and I have known for a while now that God has had something REALLY BIG in store for us, our marriage and our future together. He has opened so many doors and is allowing us to make this move so that Josh can go to Graduate school at UAB (University of Alabama at Birmingham). He is going to be able to be able to get both a Master's in Health Administration and a Master's in Business Administration. We are both so excited that he has this great opportunity and will be able to make a career change to something that he really loves. I am already so proud of him as I know that he is going to do wonderfully.

You may also ask how our move went? Although we have not made the official move yet... we were able to move all of our furniture and most of our stuff this past weekend. We had 17 WONDERFUL friends who helped us load up the truck last week and we got it all on there in 1 hour!! It was AMAZING!! (Thank you all again!!!) We then left Thursday morning bright and early for the trek to Bham with the 26 foot mini-semi moving truck. Josh's parents were kind enough to come with us for the weekend to help us unload the truck and get things settled so that we would not have so much to when we made the permanant move one week before Josh starts school. The trip up was going very well until about Phenix City (2.5 hours away from the final destination) when the truck started to have brake problems and broke down at a Chik Fil A where we had stopped to eat lunch. I have to say that we were quite worried at the thought of all of our wordly possessions on a broken truck that would have to be tilted at a 30 degree angle to be towed somewhere to be fixed. Once we got a hold of the company, they decided to just have the truck towed ALL THE WAY TO OUR APARTMENT!! (2.5 hours away...) LONG story VERY short, the truck arrived being towed by a very large semi-truck tower just fine and we unloaded everything that night. God definitely was watching out for us... nothing was damaged or broken and everything worked out just fine!! The weekend turned out to be a lot of fun!! We got virtually everything unpacked and put away (with the HUGE help of Josh's parents - THANK YOU BOTH VERY MUCH!!) We also got to do a lot more exploring around the city and of course ate at a TON of really great local restaurants. We also made a stop on the way back to Jacksonville to visit Josh's cousins in Columbus. Charla made us lunch and Glenn, Sterling and Stonie showed us their new mountain-biking trail in their backyard!! Very cool. Here are some pics from the trip...

Josh's Dad with the moving truck being towed in


"The Vulcan" at the top of the city


Having lunch with the Kalnins Family in Columbus on the way back to Jax

The mountain biking trail Glenn made in their backyard!!

I guess the final question I can answer about our move to THE HAM is when will the final move take place? Our last day of work will be Friday, August 7th and we will leave early the next morning. In the meantime, Josh and I have been staying with my Mom. I have to admit, it has been nice to be home again for a little bit... we love to be around her and to have her cook for us. (THANK YOU MOM!!) Josh is also doing lots of bonding with my mom's dog, Molly. (They went on 2 walks last night.) The move to Birmingham is going to be bittersweet as we are very sad to leave our family and friends, yet very excited about what God has for us in the future!