Pre Driving Mode family

This is my first post. Hopefully the first of many to come. Jim and I were talking the other day about where each of us is in relationship to beginning our new adventure. Jim and I are both excited about getting started and planning, although we are moving forward in different ways. He is making lists of what we need when we get the truck and I'm making lists of the things I want us to do before we get out on the road.

Our family is quite close and we're trying to spend as much time as we can with everyone. Casey and Kira are off on their own adventures this summer, so we can not spend time with them. Katie is home so we are getting to spend some time with her. She goes to college at TU, so she will be around to take care of the house. Our extended family is quite close too, so we've been spending time with my sisters, brother and nieces and nephews. Jim is an only child, so my side of the family is who we have and spend time with. Our travels are going to take a little getting use to since all of our family is about 10-20 minutes from our house. Thank goodness for technology so we can talk on phones, facebook and email, we have even started playing computer games with each other. Cards and games are what we enjoy doing while we are together. In the weeks to come before we get on the road, we are planning on spending as much time as possible with our family. We have a great-nephew whose 1st birthday party is coming up, one of our niece's 18th birthday is in just a couple of days, a nephew's 20th birthday on the day we get our truck and our niece is getting married the week of our training. So we have opportunities to spend time with everyone before we leave.

I also have a large extended family. My dad was one of 12 and my mom was one of 5. One of the things that I wanted to do before we leave is to spend some time with my aunts, uncles and cousins. Time is growing short to work that out, but I can still try. In the meantime, I started a facebook page for my dad's side of the family, so that will be a nice way to keep up with my cousins and their kids. Only one of my dad's sisters and two of his brother-in-laws are on facebook, so I'll have to rely on my cousins to fill me in. I am planning on taking phone numbers with us so that we can touch base with everyone. My cousin Jessica is working on putting a cookbook together of our favorite family recipes combined with some favorite family stories to be ready by Thanksgiving. We have a family get together every year the week before Thanksgiving. From my grandparents on down we have approximately 310 family members. Our hope is to get as many as we can there for this Thanksgiving for a group picture. We'll see!!

I think that the most difficult part of being away from home is missing the time we spend together as a family. As hectic as our schedules are, we find time to get together for different occasions. I will miss being around to get together on the spur of the moment. As much as we are able we would like to plan on being around home for the occasions when we can spend time together with family.

Our plans are to use technology to stay in touch with family so it won't seem like we are so far away from each other. Google talk, skype, facebook and cell phones will help us stay in touch. Now if we can figure out how we can eat birthday cake through computers, it would be like we are actually there. We've also checked out how we can have multiple people online video chatting at the same time...I'm not sure if the technology has caught up to the speed of our conversations. Another difficulty is being able to get everyone on at the same time. Hopefully this will develop further in the future. If anyone knows of good video conferencing please let us know.

Our house is in the process of getting a new roof. We hope that they are done with it before we leave, otherwise we will have to have a family member help close the deal sort of speak. We will be home every once in a while. Our truck owners want, at the very least, for us to be on the road for 3 weeks. After that period the dispatcher will try to get us a load close to home where we can come home and spend some time. This will give us opportunities to be home not only to spend time with family but also to do any maintenance on the house and/or cars. That is also one of my concerns...being out on the road and the kitchen sink decides to flood or something. We've always been hands on with the house, it will take some getting use to being away from the house and relying on others to take care of small emergencies that might pop up. We know that family will be around if we need something done before we can get home. It will be interesting to talk to other expediting teams to see how they handle being away from their homes. They will also probably be able to give us some tips!


Jim and I both like to write, so at least one of us will keep the blog updated. I tend to like to write about the people part of what we are doing and Jim will probably tend to write about the technical part of being on the road, driving and obstacles that we run into. I tend to be the wordy, more journalish type of writer. Jim will be more concise and write more technically. So you will get the best of both of our worlds. We will post pictures of our adventures so that others can see where we've been and what expediting is all about.

Thank you for your interest and your following. Please post questions, comments and stories of your own.

Peace and blessings to all,
Judy