It’s day one on the road & I’m sitting here in my friend Lauren’s guest room waiting for Nate to get up. Today’s activities include the Art Fairs in the morning & receiving our GPS from UPS between 2-5 this afternoon at Lauren’s house (honestly, it probably would have arrived in time since we left so late, but we were concerned we’d miss it if we sent it to our house, so we shipped it here and are super excited to get it!)
Our iPhone map got us up here no problem (Directions from Knoxville to Ann Arbor: Get on I-75. Drive for 7-8 hours. TADA!), but we would love to do more off-highway traveling. My old GPS died after 3 years leaving us stranded at 11 p.m. in the middle of northern Alabama. Hopefully this one will last longer!
We also hope to make it by the Apple Store to purchase a laptop for Nathan. One concern about this trip is Nathan’s race schedule. Since race graphics are a large part of our income, whenever the graphics need doing, we do them. If that means we’re typing graphics on the road in the middle of Nebraska, so be it! 🙂 It goes faster if we can both work on it, obviously, so we need a second computer that is travel capable. Also, Nate needs a computer to take when he travels without me since he can’t take mine! 🙂
Wow! So this is already an expensive trip what with the GPS & laptop, but these are both purchases we had intended to make and are using the trip as a reason to do it now. The GPS isn’t one of the super expensive ones, but neither is it a cheapy. It’s the Garmin Nuvi 755t (I looked at the 765, but for $50-75 more, all I got was bluetooth to hook to my phone) which I found for the cheapest at NewEgg.com. There were other places with good prices, but I’ve always had great luck with newegg, so why stray, right. Especially since we’re working with a deadline before we leave the state!
The computer Nate wants is the 13″ Macbook Pro, the slower one even. He has his big computer for major stuff like video editing, so he just needs this for small photoshop jobs and writing while on the road. I’m hoping to get a new battery for mine too (since it only lasts about 45 minutes now). So we are getting a pretty inexpensive computer! 🙂
Ok, beyond our trip purchases, we have also been invited to a bbq at our friends John & Megan’s new house. You may remember them from their wedding in October. Megan got a job teaching up here, so they moved last month. We miss them terribly! They were among our favorite Knoxvillians! But I was able to connect them with Lauren, which is AWESOME! Plus, we had already planned to come up here, so they’re a wonderful bonus to the trip! We can’t WAIT to see their new house! Of course, we REALLY can’t wait to see them!
So that’s about it. The drive yesterday took way longer than expected (Ohio has a lot of construction and very slow speed limits), but the time really flew. Nate & I worked on an idea for a short film we plan to shoot in August, post in September and enter into a festival by October 1st. I’ll have more on that later!
One last thing. Two days before we left, there was an awful (amazing) storm that just poured rain and wind. I love storms! This one knocked out the power for hours (which I also love. No power means you have to find other means of entertainment. I cleaned by window and lamp light, and we played Apples to Apples by the front door.) The wind took down about half of our across the street neighbor’s Bradford Pear! Of course, it was the side that landed on the driveway! Luckily, the man was at work or his car would have been crushed. I was only partly joking when we took down our Bradford Pear that I hated them because they were stinky, invasive and likely to split & fall on either your house or your car. I mean, to have that decision so completely verified is kind of neat. And luckily, no one was hurt in the lesson. I don’t know why people insist on planting those awful stink weeds! The Cleveland Pear grows quickly, is pretty, doesn’t stink, isn’t invasive, and doesn’t split and fall on your house or car with the same regularity as the Bradfords.
