In Missoula!

We've been here, in Missoula now since Monday around noon. I don't yet have Internet access at the rental house, so I can only blog/surf from the hotel. Why are we staying in a hotel? Because our stuff has not yet arrived. We tried sleeping on cots the first night we were here, and it lasted all of thirty minutes. The animals find the cots comfy, though:



My welcome to Missoula was less than great, as it was raining when we got here. According the locals, it had been beautiful the day before. Go figure. Then we drove by the new house, and I panicked a bit because the siding was the wrong color, and not the cool red we expected. Apparently, it comes from the factory white and they paint it after it is up, which makes perfect sense. I was thrown off by the fact that the base white color is very similar to one of the trim colors we picked, so I worried that they had flip-flopped the colors somehow.

I was a little concerned Tuesday morning when we woke up to more cold, gray, rain. Laura said "I warned you that it is gray in the winter here," to which I responded, "yes, I thought by 'winter' you meant, like, January, not November!" Fortunately, it did clear up a bit. The last few days it has been drippy and rainy in the morning, and then a bit more clear in the afternoons. Possibly snow by the weekend. This morning it was obvious that it had snowed up in the mountains a bit -- you could see the line on Mount Sentinel where the snow stopped.

Overall things are going pretty well. We've been to Target just about every day since we got here. We're hoping that we won't need to go back at least for a few days now. It is pretty odd living in two places -- the Comfort Inn and the rental house. Waiting around for our stuff to arrive is making me very anxious, especially since I need to setup everything for telecommuting by this weekend so that I can start work on Monday. I was hoping to spend these last few days unpacking and organizing, not running errands and sitting around on camp chairs in an empty living room! It also doesn't really feel like we've moved when we're staying in the hotel -- it feels just like so many other vacations. I don't think the fact that we've really moved will sink in until we actually have our stuff at the rental house.

The new house is looking great and coming along fast. I'm really hoping we can close early in December and get settled well before Christmas. We did a walk through yesterday, which was nice for me since I never got a chance to see the inside of a unit like ours when we bought it.

A few pictures:
The tiled entry:


The back of the house from the detached garage:


Master Bedroom, with a view of the backyard and garage:


View from the room that will be my home office (I am SO looking forward to working here!):


And a few pictures from our drive:
Crossing the Mississippi from Wisconsin to Minnesota. I like the shadows of our bicycles on the roof of the car:


Cricket getting bored in South Dakota:


Arriving in Wyoming after the very long trek across South Dakota:


Arriving in Montana at last!


A view of the Tobacco Root Mountains on the final leg of the trip:


Climbing Homestake pass:


Crossing the divide!