It’s been almost a month since I wrote this post about our upcoming move. How is that possible? Almost a month has passed?!

Micah wanted me to write a “how to move your 10 person family 7 hours away” post… I’m not sure I have one of those to write. Honestly, Josh should write that one. Why? Because my Step One on how to move your 10 person family 7 hours away is: find yourself a Joshua John Narraway (except you can’t because there is only 1 and he is not available). Seriously, from planning, to packing, to the actual moving and setting up… he’s the only reason any of it was possible (sappy shout out of appreciation to my husband).

But, something I can write about is the drive down. On the morning of June 30th Josh left New York in the moving van with Micah and Isaiah to head to West Virginia to get as much as possible settled before the rest of the crew arrived. We’d packed up the moving van on the 29th and had a final farewell campfire. Things got very real. I’m so thankful for family and friends that surrounded us in those last few days in New York. People who played with our kids, cleaned disgusting junk out of a cupboard, moved appliances, packed boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes upon boxes (I think you get the point), to those who spent the last night with us, all the farewell calls, messages, cards and heart-felt words… I’m getting teary just thinking about it all.

Then that Saturday morning came and time flew by so very, very fast. And there we were: me and 6 of the 8 children in our van packed more full than I thought it could possibly be with of our belongings than I imagined we’d had left, towing our trailer full bikes for our family of 10.

and we were off to begin #thenextbignarrawayadventure

Truth be told I was imagining the trip was going to be just plain awful. I hadn’t slept well in a week. I was traveling with a 15 month old, 3 year old, 6 year old, 7 year old, 9 year old and a 13 year old… on a 7 hour car ride. I’d prepared for it to be a 9 hour trip with lots of screaming. I was right on the hours but the screaming was minimal, I promise I behaved myself.

Actually, I can show you some of our journey. Lily humored me and documented our trip in video and photographs. We made this silly little video to commemorate that trip.

I may be the only one that liked that silly 2 minute video…

Fun story: we stopped twice on our trip down. The first was a scheduled stop, the second a little less so. You saw that picture of the blown tire? I blew a trailer tire about 20 miles north of Pittsburg. God is gracious and we were only a mile from an exit and there was a park and ride as soon as we got off of I-79. BUT when I saw that tire I knew more was damaged than just the tire.

It should have looked like this…

But instead it looked like this…

So, here I was with a little more than 3 hours left to drive and a trailer full of bikes broken more than I could fix… so I left the trailer at the park and ride to finish the journey with the kids. Josh and I went back late that night to retrieve our cargo and that broken trailer.

I call this picture, “When bicycles are sleepy and trailers are in time out.”

Silly, I know. To be fair… it was almost 1 am when we got back to the park and ride, moved the bikes, disassembled the trailer and flipped it into the moving truck.

Then the fun began. We were VERY tired. With a few extra stops, driving slow for safety and a few shenanigans. We arrived back at Cowen at 5:22am… When I finally went to sleep I was less than 20 minutes away from 24 hours awake. The last 24 hour adventure I remember also involved a road trip and a trailer mishap… (Christy, Adam, Stephen… remember that?)

 

Anyway, with one hour of sleep and a short nap in the afternoon, we started our first full day as a family here at West Virginia Baptist Camp Cowen. The kids are settling in, Josh seems to be doing well, I’ve met more people than I can possibly remember (the total appears to be over 1,000 between more than 780 campers in those weeks, counselors, directors, parents, pastors, camp supporters, vendors and staff.)

That will have to be a story for a different day 🙂