I think this might be the longest I’ve ever gone without blogging!

It’s been almost an entire month since I’ve had a moment to sit down and blog or even LOOK at my blog and it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. But it has, I checked this morning and made that wide-eyed emoji face in disbelief. It probably doesn’t feel like it’s been a month because I’ve been busy moving from Colorado Springs to our new home in Kingsland, Georgia!

And what an adventure that has been. Thank goodness for social media, because I was able to document the craziness of what I’ve come to call National Lampoon’s Cross Country Move. Our family is a walking, talking Lampoon movie – the good, the bad and the ugly!

Before I jump in, just a couple of things –

First off: any pics I share on here are from my iPhone because I simply didn’t want to use my big camera while traveling. I wanted to just take a quick pic and didn’t want to fool around with my gear. Don’t worry though, my camera’s are dusted off and back to work next week!

Secondly: be prepared to laugh and cry with me, because – what a friggin’ month it has been.

Ready? Here we go.

We spent our last few days in Estes Park, and we camped at Jellystone. It was a ton of fun … even though it rained, hailed and was freezing cold pretty much the entire week we were there.

 

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A post shared by Ashley Durham (@xoashdurham) on May 27, 2019 at 3:38pm PDT

We roasted marshmallows, had campfires every night and did our first annual homework bonfire. If you’ve never done it, try it at the end of the next school year – burn all the homework, the quizzes, the tests and worksheets left in your kids’ backpacks. It’s cathartic for everyone, I promise!

And then, we started off on our adventure, driving from Colorado to Georgia!

But not before …

Luckily, I’m married to a hottie mechanic and we were off on our adventure after an hour or so!

It was a long drive – took us a few days to get to Georgia. Since I was driving the Uhaul, I couldn’t take a ton of road trip photos like I normally do – but I did get this cool shot of Kansas at sunrise.

Oh, and of course – there was a LOT of coffee.

 

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A post shared by Ashley Durham (@xoashdurham) on Jun 3, 2019 at 6:47am PDT

We learned a really important lesson on this trip: the kids having their own room is a traveling GAME CHANGER. We rented rooms that were adjoining and instead of making all of the kids share a queen sized bed (which works about as well as you’d expect with two teens and two tweens), we rented two rooms and man oh man was it so much less stressful. Yes, it costs more BUT I can honestly tell you that we’ll never only get a single room again.

Of course … we did have to share with the dogs.

But neither of us mind that too much!

And it was all going great until we got to Tennessee … and I noticed the RV was leaning a bit while we were driving on the interstate.

Yep – two tires blown in 3 days. I have a feeling we might have been over our weight limit with the RV, but … that’s okay, right!? Haha! And there was a random tick on me in the middle of Missouri in a Wal-Mart, but I didn’t take any photos of THAT.

Finally – we made it to Georgia!

We decided to take our time on our last morning before arriving to our new home in Kingsland, and left a little later than we normally do. But then, Randy was trying to pull out of the hotel parking lot and side-swiped a US Forestry truck.

We even got to meet the county sheriff in Macon! Haha! I took a video on my Instagram Story and over-layed the theme to Cops on it … Randy didn’t find that as funny as I did, but, come on – that’s funny, right!?!

But, we FINALLY made it to Kingsland and this moment, right here, made all the chaos and stress of the last 7 months absolutely worth it.

 

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This moment is everything to me. Randy with his dad and brother, playing cornhole in the backyard. What you can’t see are our 7 combined children + 11 combined dogs running around and having an amazing time playing together. You can’t hear the birds singing in the trees. You can’t feel the warm breeze. Most importantly, you can’t feel the immense feeling of joy I feel seeing Randy so full of joy. The last 7 months since Ricky’s diagnosis have been full of heavy weight – bad news, thousands of miles, an unknown future. But today? It was just pure joy and for that I’m grateful. #fuckcancer #cancersucks #crosscountrymove #family #familyreunion #braincancer #gbm #glioblastoma

A post shared by Ashley Durham (@xoashdurham) on Jun 6, 2019 at 3:43pm PDT

It’s interesting moving somewhere like Camden County, where so many newcomers are brought here by the Navy (the King’s Bay submarine base is here). Everyone asks what brought us to this small town of 17,000 people and we explain that we had the means and opportunity to be closer to Randy’s brother and we wanted a simpler life for our family.

And people just get it.

Y’all – I freaking LOVE Georgia. I keep having the strangest experiences of deja vu, flashes of moments where I realized that I’ve seen those moments before. I believe in past lives, but I don’t think that’s what these moments are for me. I realized I’ve seen them in my dreams – of my kids riding their bikes down the street and squealing as they jump into our pool. I’ve seen Randy sipping a cup of coffee, watching the sun come over the trees. I’ve seen me standing with my toes in the Atlantic ocean, feeling the sun on my back.

I’ve been dreaming about this place for my entire life.

And we’re finally home.