Complete. Well, sorta.

So, we arrived in Hollywood on Wednesday as planned and got in to the apartment. The furniture delivery was delayed by several days and there's a bunch of stuff to get situated, such as last bills at the old house, finding a job, turning on the gas and so on, but at least I'm here. There's no available wifi at the apartment, unfortunately, unless I decide to get my own account so pretty much every day so far has started at the coffee shop on Hollywood and Orange to use the internet.

The major part of the adventure is complete, however. I'm here, the cat's here, I've got my keys, and the first month's rent is paid. Now it's up to me to make it work.

Albuquerque 3

The final day in Albuquerque is coming to a close, and today was a pretty restful day. We went to Old Town, which is the historic downtown of Albuquerque and looks a lot like Santa Fe, then Jake took us to an old-school taquiera and I cooked dinner on Austin's propane wok-like apparatus called a "Disc-It". Just gearing up for the drive tomorrow, the final 12 hours and then we're in L.A. I'm looking forward to the driving being done.

Hot Springs

Day 2 in Albuquerque ended up being a lot of time spent in the car, but it was totally worth it. We drove up to Santa Fe and spent some time walking around looking at art vendors and beautiful scenery, then the Albuquerque natives (Jake, Billy, and Kiyoko) took us up a ridiculously rocky, off road trail up to a hot spring on the side of a mountain. Hot tubs don't have a view like this:




No tallys for today, too tired.

Albuquerque

Albuquerque is a natural oddity. We arrived in the middle of a rainstorm, only to have it become clear and sunny during the time it took us to go in to Jake's house, change, and walk back out again. We grabbed dinner at Frontier, which is an Albuquerque legend, and are now engaged in a bit of re-acquaintence celebration. Not too many road tallys for today:

Total Number of Miles Driven: 650
Total Number Of Super Nice People Met in the Middle of Nowhere, New Mexico: 3
Total Number of "Jesus Is Lord, Not a Swear Word" Gas Stations Seen: 1 (On route 40, completely epic)
Total Number of Mountains Gaped At: Countless

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End of Day One

So, when all is said and done Day One could have gone much worse. Despite the late start and the initial cat freak outs, we made great time and the cat eventually calmed down and was a model passenger. The only final difficulty was that we had to try about 6 hotels before we found one that would allow a cat, but it turned out to also be the cheapest place so I guess it all evens out. Final tally of events:

Miles Driven: 955 miles
Stops made: 4, excluding the stop to change
Total Times Called an Asshole by a Stranger in Missouri: 1 (but this was probably deserved, I didn't have time to explain myself appropriately)
Total Number Of Times We Lost The Cat In The Car: 2
Number Of Hotels That Were Rude About Not Allowing Cats: 2

Not bad, not bad at all.

In through the nose, Out through the mouth

This cat is a handful, to say the least. First, she leaps out of the car and I have to tackle her in Kaitlyn's yard. then, she pees all over my lap and I have to change in a parking lot. However, it's been about 7 hours or so and she seems to have found a groove. Otherwise it's business as usual on the road. We'll see what happens after lunch.

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Day One

Already off to a bad start - I misjudged how much stuff i was taking in the car and how hard it would be to pill the cat. Thus, i'm about a half hour behind schedule. Time to get moving.

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T-10 Hours

So, I have decided to try and keep a running blog of my move to Los Angeles so everyone would know how it was going. Right now all of my furniture is already packed up and on the way to California, I have but to follow it. At the moment the plan is to get up at about 3:30 tomorrow morning, pack everything up into the car, give the cat her sedative, then do a final walk through of the house before going to pick up Kaitlyn who has graciously offered to be my co-pilot for this trip and didn't even complain about the ungodly hour of departure. So, if all goes according to plan, here's our route:

Day 1: Detroit, Michigan to Tulsa, OK - 960 miles, 16 hours. Just past Tulsa there's a string of hotels, surely one of them will have a vacancy...right?

Day 2: Tulsa, OK to Albuquerque, NM - 650 miles, 10 hours. End of the first leg of the journey. Here we meet up with my friends in Albuquerque and give the poor cat a few days to relax and detox.

Day 3: Albuquerque, NM to Hollywood, CA - 794 miles, 12 hours. By this time I hope to have coordinated with my landlord to determine a time that I can meet up with her, finalize paperwork, and get keys to the apartment. My furniture is slated to arrive several days after I do.

My biggest concern about this drive is my cat. The drive, mind you, not the move as a whole. I have far different concerns regarding that. I worry about the cat because she hates being in the car, and I would really prefer to avoid sedating her if at all possible. However, if past experience is anything to judge by (particularly coming home from the vet earlier this week), she NEEDS to be sedated while we're driving otherwise she'll be stressed out and miserable. So, although it's not how I would prefer to go about things, tomorrow morning I'm going to get up and give her a pill to knock her out, and hopefully she'll be asleep or at least relaxed for most of the day. We will see how things go.