Departing Tampa .... Arriving Dallas

We finally arrived in Dallas after a 3-day road trip ... we broke our trip up into 3 shorter days (still ended up being 8-hours each day with traffic and breaks for Kelty).

Backtracking to Saturday ....

We had a rough departure from Tampa despite a lot of planning and prep work. We had scheduled a carpet cleaning and a carpet stretching for Friday morning (cleaning) and Fri afternoon (stretching) ... these were the last two things we needed to get done before I waxed the hardwood floors before leaving the house. The rest of the house was done and let me tell you it was pretty impressive ... sparkling clean! To make a long story short ... the scheduled carpet cleaners never came; we had to schedule another company to come out short notice Fri afternoon (cost us twice as much) which pushed the carpet stretchers back to Sat at 8:30 am. We figured with an 8:30 am appt for the stretcher we would still be out of the house by 11am ... yeah, whatever! The carpet stretchers called at 8:30 and said they were pulled to another job and they'll be about 2 hours late ... well, as of 1:00 pm they were not there and we were unable to get a hold them! We said forget it (not necessarily in those words); I waxed the floors and we started loading up the Jeep .... only to realize that all of our luggage to get us through the next 2 months did not fit ... seriously, it was impossible! So .... Al drove to Walmart and bought a rear rack that used the tow hitch on the Jeep. While assembling the rack he realized the key that opened the lock for the trailer hitch had been packed! He had to saw off the lock and trailer hitch pin and I drove to Home Depot to get a replacement part. After a tearful good-bye to both sets of neighbors we hit the road at 2:30pm .... destination Pensacola (we were staying with our long-time friends, Rob and Amanda). We arrived at 8:30 and ended up chatting and playing Wii Fit until 2:30am! Whoa! We stayed until 12 noon the next day ... it was such a rejuvinating visit!

Ok ... here is a pic and a video!

Our last photo in front of our Tampa home

Al and Jordan sawing off the hitch lock! One last project between neighbors!

Hopefully my next blog will be a trip down memory lane about our 4 years (almost) in Tampa! We already miss our dear Florida friends!