The end of the week, the end of the month.

Where did July go?  This is crazy, we are now more than halfway though 2009, and I can’t account for several of the months, namely May, June and July.  Perhaps David took them and put them somewhere….

Yesterday I finally got keys to the school…  Oh my, there are a lot of keys to the school.  For some strange reason they don’t believe in keying the school with a master key or two, so now I have a couple of key rings that contain exactly 2,407 keys.  I think I will take the 3 or 4 most used and put them on my key ring, and then stash the others in my desk.

Also yesterday I got my office at the school.  It is down the hall from the two classrooms that I will be teaching in:  History and Bible.  So today Kristie and I are going over to make some plans and start moving things around.  She also has an office inside the Music classroom, so we will need to spend some time in there as well.

I will post some pics of classrooms, and offices later on (when there is something to show.)

Slow Monday

Nothing particularly new from the home front today.  We just unpacked more boxes, and ordered a new refrigerator, as the one in this house has, well, very little to be desired.

One thing cool that we discovered in this area is Fire Flies (or Lightning Bugs.)  They are all over this area, and are really cool to watch.  Unfortunately, the lighting conditions are awful for photography or video, so I haven’t been able to capture the beauty of the soft flickers of light that blink around in the evening darkness.  However, I have been trying, but the pictures and video just don’t do the actual experience justice.

Here is the best that I have so far.  You will need to click the image to make it full size, and if you look to the right of the tree, you will see several bright points of light – those are the fire flies.

View our trip!

Apparently our GPS receiver keeps a log of everywhere we go.  So I converted the log into a cool Google Earth file that you can see everywhere we drove.  Unfortunately we had trouble with our GPS unit, so the trail starts in central South Dakota.

You will need to zoom in slightly before the trip trail will appear, but once you begin to zoom, you wont have any difficulty seeing the trail (it’s multicolored!)

If you recall from a previous post, we ran through the rain to go to Denny’s (not great food, but close enough for tired people.)  Below is a sample Google Earth image that shows the route we took through the rain to Denny’s.  Since I had the GPS in my pocket, it recorded where we went.  As you can see, it goes through the center of another motel.  This is because it was raining so hard we decided to take a shortcut though the other motel’s lobby area to try to avoid as much rain as possible.

Click the image above to make it bigger.

Click HERE to download the Google Earth file  Note:  it will open a new window.  Find the download link to get the file.

Our home and USA

USA is a cool and patriotic abbreviation for our new school: Union Springs Academy.  Our house is not bad, but it needs a little work, and I think that eventually we will be quite comfortable here.  The area is beautiful, surrounded by trees, and of course a lake close by.  It is very humid, and I think that will take some time to get used to, but like any environment, the body will eventually acclimate.

We are very close to the school, so we will be able to walk to work, which will be very nice and will help save gas.  So here are a few pictures of the house, and of the Academy.

Above: panoramic view from our front door.
Below: Some pics of the Academy.

Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York

Like I mentioned on the previous post I didn’t have Internet access until yesterday, and because I was so busy getting something loosely resembling a living environment, I didn’t have the change to update the blog.  So here are some pics of the states we passed through up to the point of arriving in Union Springs.  We arrived at about 12 noon on Thursday, and began to unload the truck.  We were fortunate to have dry weather to unload with because it had rained on us fairly steadily since arriving in Cleveland.  In fact there was a Denny’s about a block from our motel, so we decided to make a mad dash and just run to it.  However, only seconds into our jog, the sky dumped onto us and didn’t stop until we arrived in Union Springs.

Our frequent companion on the trip.

Chicago as we are leaving.

Indiana country side.

Ah, the rain.

Cleveland

Yes, I realize they are only signs.  But believe me, the country side at this point all looks the same.  Especially in the rain.

But just so you believe me, here is some New York.

Cleveland Ohio

Today was spent with alot of driving though Illinois, Indiana and now Ohio.  We do have some pics to upload but they will have to wait.  The scenery is very nice, but not much different than what I have already posted.  It is mostly flat, but thick with trees.  We are so far finding people in this side of the country to be very nice and exceptionally helpful.

One particularly cool thing we found is the rest stops.  Unlike the scary outhouse rest stops that we found in Montana, the facilities here are top notch.  They are large buildings housing extremely large bathrooms, usually two restaurants, a large gift shop, and a gas station.

Tomorrow we finish our trip by continuing our drive though Ohio, Pennsylvania, and then into New York.  We plan to be at our new home by 12 noon NY time.  We won’t have internet until Friday, so don’t expect any new updates here until then, but I will be able to post some facebook updates from time to time.  (Unless I can find someone’s WiFi to tap from.) :-)

Sears Tower Video