Monday, February 21, 2011

First Month in FoCo

Well, we've been here almost 5 weeks and are getting settled in nicely. All of the boxes are unpacked, all of the bikes are built and we can get around town pretty well. I was sick for a good part of January but Johanna was able to take advantage of some of the warmer days and hit some of the trails around town.

The drive from Virginia had its ups and downs. We started off on a Thursday evening headed to West Virginia. We had the birds and our luggage packed into the Honda. Everything was great until about 30 miles from our destination. Snow started to come down and we found ourselves driving through the mountains of W Va in the dark, in the snow. Not fun, but we made it. The next morning we made our way to Chicago. Traffic was fine, but we had a little bit more weather to contend with on the way. Nothing like we had yet to see, but still very annoying.

We stayed in Chicago from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon and spent some really good time with my sister-in-law and brother. We ate, chilled out, visited a Whole Foods the size of a small airport and even helped them prep for their adopted greyhounds they were expecting in a couple of weeks. It was nice to just chill and recover from two days of snowy travel.

On Sunday we had a short leg to Grinnell, Iowa to visit some old Charlottesville friends and of course on Monday morning we wake up to more snow. We had 460 miles of driving to do to cover most of Iowa and Nebraska to get to North Platte. We faced some really rough weather all the way through Iowa and well into Nebraska. This was the second snow front that we were driving through.



We made it safely to North Platte (which is kind of a hole) stayed the night in a Motel and were off to Fort Collins the next day. The weather was much nicer and we had a short (~240 mile) leg into Wyoming and down into Colorado.

It would still be a couple of days before our stuff would show up but at least we were off the road.

Most days there's some Charlottesville Tea in the tea pot and the wood stove is roaring in the sunroom. We've had our mix of weather with high's near 0 and some nice 55 degree days as well. Getting around by bike in this town is awesome (which was a great excuse to buy another bike) but I can report more on that later.

So, next time...maybe a tour of our house, a recap of my latest bike project, and some of the other things we've been getting into over the last 5 weeks.

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