Lessons

The first few days living in a new place can be just a little stressful. Actually it can be REALLY stressful. Here are some tips that might be useful that we learned.

1. Be prepared for your credit card NOT to work in a different state, even if you have talked with your company. It will take on average four phone calls to your company before it actually starts going through. Your credit/debit card will normally not work when you have a loaded cart with a line of people behind you waiting impatiently. This was one situation where I was glad I knew no one in this town.
2. There are actually two types of stoves. Make sure to find out if yours is a “free standing” or a “slide in”. They may look the same but they aren’t! Nothing like finding out it doesn’t fit when it’s put in your kitchen.
3. Take as many 10% off coupons for Lowe’s as you can find. Always price match.
4. Air mattresses rarely stay inflated for an entire night. Don’t expect to get sleep.
5. Bring lots of bug spray if you are moving into a house that hasn’t been lived in for awhile. Bugs will be everywhere!
6. If moving to the deep south have your mop on hand. The movers will sweat on your furniture, floors, and everywhere else as they move your stuff. Yuck…

These are just a few of the lessons that we learned in the first 48 hours being here. Thankfully shortly after the movers left our wonderful friends Joe, Marianne, Madeline, and Hayden Cox arrived to help us. We put them straight to work doing everything from unpacking to electric work. Thanks Cox Family!!! We love you! Finally I had to include the picture of us at Cheeburger Cheeburger. It was our first meal in Shreveport and I said, “Ryan, let’s take this picture and put it on our blog one day!.” So…here it is!

1096 Miles

1096 miles. Wow, for someone who has always lived in Greenville this was a pretty big move for me. I’m going to try to back up in this blog and start back at the beginning so our blog will be in chronological order as much as possible. My last day of teaching at Eastern was June 10th. Early the next morning (6:30 a.m) we packed into the car and headed off for Shreveport. The night before our families had come and hung out with us one last time and of course we had to eat some great food. It was unbelievable how much stuff we still had to pack in the car even though we had already packed 5000 pounds of “stuff” onto the moving van. I’ll be honest. I boo- hooed all the way down Queen Anne’s Rd but then I managed to pull it together (thankfully for Ryan’s sanity) and turned off the waterworks for at least 24 hours. Here are several highlights of our drive:

• South of the Border- Have you ever sausage a place? :)
  
• Eating lunch at Checker’s (we didn’t realize that this would be our last time because they don’t exist in LA)
  
• Getting a push-up popsicle at a random gas station (Ryan made fun of me)
  
• Eating at the nicest Chick-Fillet we have ever seen


• Going across the Mississippi River
  
• An unbelievable amount of bugs plastered to our car from being on the road so long.
  

Okay, it’s no secret that I don’t like to drive. I will go ahead and confess. Out of the 18 hours we rode in the car, I drove about 2. I only made it from Augusta through Atlanta. Sorry Ryan! I really am getting better about driving since living here though. When we finally got here (about midnight Louisiana time) we were praying that we would be able to even get into our house/neighborhood and we would even remember which house it was. Thankfully we were able to. Our house was easy to spot- the only one in the neighborhood that had a jungle in the front yard. Since our furniture was not coming for a few days we got our comfy air mattress that Ryan’s mom thoughtfully provided and set up camp in one of the bedrooms. 1096 miles later, we were “home”.

The Adventure Begins!

Finally…our blog has begun. Around the time that we found out we were making the big move from NC to LA, we decided that it might be fun to blog about our “adventures” in the deep south. We thought it would be neat to look back in five years and see all that had happened in our lives during our stint in the pelican state. Of course, it has taken us awhile to get it started. But, here we go! I want to first apologize. Ryan was supposed to write the first blog; he is the talented writer in the family. However, due to scheduling conflicts I have taken the plunge and will be beginning our blog journey. I would first of all like to explain the origin of our blog’s name: The Crawdad Chronicles. For those of you who have not had the privilege of living in Louisiana, people here are all about some crawdad. Just about every restaurant carries some form of the little crawlers, even McAllister’s! So far I have had fried crawdads, gumbeaux with crawdad mixed in, crawdad étouffé and…crawdad cheesecake. These are just a few of the many crawdad food possibilities that are offered. Crawdads (known to the rest of the world as Crayfish or crawfish) are often found in the bayous of Louisiana along with a variety of other species such as alligators and shrimp. So we decided to use this special creature as the inspiration for our blog. The next five years will no doubt be an interesting journey and we hope that you will follow all of our adventures on: The Crawdad Chronicles.