Coming to Iowa, Part 1

Joey went back to work yesterday, and he was right when he said now I'd be able to get back to work. I got another truck load of stuff to give away after just one day of Joey working. (Normally I would take a couple days to watch oprah and eat bon bons.) For five years we've had a home in Iowa and now that we're leaving he actually got a job close to home, but I don't care we're still leaving. Have I said how excited I am about who's moving in here? Well, I am...very excited. It's my cousin and her family!! I just hope I haven't hyped the place up too much. I do think that she'll like the small town community feel out here, though.

It's got me thinking about why/how we came out here in the first place. We were living in the motorhome, just Joey, Jake and I, and Joey got a job to work on new Wind Towers being built near Storm Lake, Iowa. It was a 4 mo. job starting in May, so it was the perfect summer job. We only had the motorhome at the time so my parents lent us their car to drag behind and use for the summer. Mom also hated that we didn't have a phone so my Dad got us a cell phone. They must have known something was going to happen! We barely made it to Palm Springs from the Mojave Desert when the engine on the motorhome blew. Luckily we had a phone to call for help, and a car to drive back to my folks after coaxing the homo all the way to Blythe. The mechanics said it'd be a few days so Jake and I went back to my folks, and Joey flew on to Iowa. The adventure has just begun...

Since it was only going to be a couple days I went ahead and left the fridge on, with everythihng inside. Big mistake! They had shut off the propane, and then took over two weeks to put in the new engine. The inside of the fridge was basically black. My Dad dropped off Jake, who just turned two, and I, and we begun our cross country trip to Iowa. We stopped at the In-laws in Phoenix for a quick visit and then headed North towards Payson after night fall. I make it to the middle of nowhere so the motorhome can break down once again, and of course the mechanic in Blythe is not answering his phone. I guess I called 911 and they put me thru to a tow truck dispatcher. It's after midnight now so I give them a big sob story how I'm out here all alone with a baby, and I'm 6 months pregnant to boot, so she sends someone out immediately. As immediately as you can get in the middle of nowhere, anyway. So I call my brother in law to come sit with me, and that just pissed the tow truck driver off when he arrived. He had run out in such a hurry that he had his shirt on backwards and inside out! The driver chilled out on the way to the shop in Apache junction and even hopped the fence at the shop to plug me in to their electric. Jake and I spent the night in the parking lot, got everything fixed the next day and headed back out after noon.

Did I mention Jake was two? Not only was he two, but he was also a kid that grew up walking down the aisles of the motorhome while it was in motion, so getting him to stay in his car seat for me was not going to happen very easily. He would wiggle himself out and then one time I actually lost him. While driving down the road. He was hiding from me, in the bathroom. I learned quickly to drive while he slept or ate. We'd stop a couple times a day at indoor McDonald's playgrounds, then I'd drive for hours, then stop to eat and play, then drive some more. Our radio went out about half way there.....don't let your kid put pennies into the cigarette lighter, trust me. The electrical will never work the same again. We made it to Albuquerque around 1am, pulled into the KOA for a few hours sleep and then back on the road bright and early. That KOA never ran my credit card and I'm thinking it's because they saw how little time I was actually there, if so..thank you, I've been wanting to do that. The next night I made it to NE for more free camping. Almost every town in NE has free camping in their city parks, and we always try to take advantage of that. Of course we fill up our gas tanks in their towns so we don't totally take advantage of them. I almost killed us driving so late at night on dark windy one lane highway roads, but I didn't, so all is good.

We pulled into Storm Lake while joey was still at work and it was everything he said it was going to be. It was fabulous to us desert folk. It was green! We knew we were going to like this place.