We Have Made It Home!

We arrived in Columbia Falls, Montana a week ago. It was not a smooth move….however, we are now here and we have not found anything broken yet. We took the first half of the day off to go to Glacier National Park. The weather has been cold since we arrived. We opened all the windows the first night we slept here (last Friday) and it dropped down to 40 degrees that night. It hasn’t been above 63 degrees since then and the nights have been pretty cool. This is not normal for this time of year, but it is what it is. It has also been raining off and on…. which meant it was snowing in the park up on the pass. Today it was 10 degrees warmer, and the sun was out in force, so we took a break to enjoy it. In all of our trips to Montana, we have never been able to make it all the way through Glacier National Park on Going-to-the-Sun Road. Today we were able to make it to the section we had not been to before. We were rewarded with gorgeous views and some rocky mountain big horned sheep and some mountain goats. We also saw a lot of mountain prairie dog-like critters and marmots. Marmots can be quite large. We met a man on a trail who swore he just saw two wolverines. Nope. Marmots. There was even a park ranger nearby who said it was most likely marmots….as one scampered out into view right on cue.

We have had a few hiccups with this move, as I mentioned. We moved ourselves and the packers (hired to pack the furniture and wall hangings) were done in less than 90 minutes and said the movers loading our U-Haul would do most of that. Well, they did not. Rich finally, after a frustrating morning of them not doing a stellar job, just asked them to leave. We also found out we had a leak of axle grease on our new driveway in Omaha. Not only did the stain on the driveway not come out, we had to drive the U-Haul to a garage to have it repaired with all our stuff in the back of it. It took them 3 hours. Then Rich repacked the back of the U-Haul….allowing for lots of other things to be added. I thought we would leave by about 1 p.m. to start heading to Montana. After several setbacks, we finally pulled out at 7:45. I drove Rich’s humongous truck pulling a 16-foot trailer from the store. Rich drove the 26-foot U-Haul truck. We drove 22 hours to get here. We tried to avoid major cities and such with our long loads. We arrived last Thursday afternoon. We got our keys to get into the house on Friday. We are currently renting the house until closing. The company we are working with (we had no choice whatsoever), is miserably slow and bad with communication. We would love to close prior to us having to drive back to Omaha early next week. We shall see. We have had some furniture we ordered delivered already and that has helped make the house seem like home. We have another delivery tomorrow morning and we plan to work hard on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to get things situated and have everything pretty much set for when we return in a few weeks with Lily and Tallinn.

We finally got our post office mailbox keys yesterday so Rich could get his cards from the kids. I have yet to be able to pin down an oncologist here in Montana. They are not making the transition easy and because of that, I am missing a shot this month. I am trying not to let it worry me, but it is frustrating that no one seems to care. I will reserve judgement until after I meet them. So far I have yet to be able to get past the person who deals with new patients. Hopefully she will call me back tomorrow and we can get the ball rolling. Maybe I will just pop in and say hello tomorrow and perhaps she won’t be able to blow me off if I am standing in front of her face.

Our house. I absolutely love it! It is so spacious and airy and light with so many windows and so much room! I know we will be very happy here and when the winters come and we are homebound for days at a time, it will be something enjoyable. Rich got us rocking chairs for the front porch. They are lovely and just in front of my office window….forever tempting me to come out on the porch and sit and rock for awhile. Joe’s windchimes are hanging there….our American flag, and as of last night, a hummingbird feeder. We have never had one before but we have a LOT of hummingbirds flitting around our house so I thought I would give them a reason to stay for awhile. We have seen hummingbirds and deer everyday in our yard. It has been very neat. Haven’t seen a rabbit or a squirrel since we came into Montana though. There are also no cardinals….but hey…there are stellar jays and robins and bald eagles and hummingbirds! Our grass was up to our knees when we arrived but the realtor group we are working with had it cut for us yesterday, which was one less thing to try and do. We had a couple of issues with our fridge and freezer….it went into demo mode and turned itself off just a few hours after we put food in the fridge and freezer. Thank goodness for Google! Our internet also had a glitch in it overnight a couple of nights ago and wouldn’t recognize our password anymore. Luckily, it was nothing we did and a phone call to the cable company got it fixed on their end. So there have been some hiccups, but I still love the place and can’t wait to be here full time. We have two family trips, back-to-back coming up and then we can be up here for a few weeks before we have to leave to get Lily to college in mid-August. It is supposed to rain the next three days, so that is a blessing to make us really hunker down and get more of the house finished.

I wanted to share some photos from Glacier National Park today. The field of yellow is from around the corner of our house. It is a field of canola. It is so vibrantly yellow, you almost need sunglasses to look at it!