From Utah to Pennsylvania!

The past 2 weeks have been very busy! We managed to finish work, school, pack, move, drive, and drive, and drive some more, unpack, ect. all in about a week and a half's time! Not this last Monday, but the Monday before, my family took some family pictures before Ben and I left. Here are a few of them.

The next day we packed all of our stuff (well almost everything) into an ABF trailer and sent it on its way to Pennsylvania! Wednesday I took my last final at BYU (Yay!), and we took care of some errands for our trip. Thursday morning, we left for Denver around 7am. We had a fun trip listening to a book on CD. It was pretty cheesy but kept us entertained. We stopped for lunch at my Grandma Riley's and visited with for a bit before hitting the road again. The next stop was in Littleton to visit Ben's brother Grant, and his family. We visited with Grant, Cassy, Garrett, and little Zach for a little bit, and it was fun. Their kids are sooooo cute! After that we hit the road again, but stopped for the night at my Grandma and Grandpa Green's in Elizabeth. It felt good to finally be done driving for the day! We visited with my grandparents, their dog Darby (who Ben LOVED), and the horses! I couldn't get any good pictures of the horses sadly because it was too dark and they were moving too much. But all 5 of them came right up to us! I got to see Flashy, the horse I used in Westernaires and haven't seen for about 5 or so years! She came up to me for about 1 minute and then decided she had enough and was on her way. Then Polly, my family's horse came up and visited with us, and shortly after the whole gang was there checking out Ben- stuffing there noses into his pockets and wiping their slobber/snot all over us. It was great. They haven't changed a bit!
The next morning we got up at 4:30am and got ready to go, however after eating breakfast my body not-so-politely let me know that it was not ready for food that early in the morning. We hit the road for the long haul to Chicago around 5am. I took a few pictures of the sunrise while we were stuck waiting for some trains to pass.

The drive was pretty smooth through Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois. I did manage to spit my bubblegum into Ben's water bottle thinking that it was his sunflower seed shells bottle, but other than that nothing bad happened! We got to Ben's parent's house around 10:30pm central time and were EXHAUSTED. 16 hours of driving is NOT fun. So on Saturday we just chilled in Chicago and enjoyed being with Ben's family. They even made Ben a cake and gave him his present for his birthday! And of course Ben got to see Cody, his dog which made him very very happy.

The house that Ben's parents are moving into in about a week.

Playing some Foosball with the fam.

You can see my belly is getting larger :)

Ben leading us in the birthday song

We left Sunday morning around 8am, following Ben's parents and Brian. I'll be honest. I did not like this part of the trip. Not at all. It rained about 90% of the time and of course we hydroplaned when it was my turn to drive. We were okay though, nothing scary happened except for the fact I though we were going to die like every 3 minutes of that 11 hour drive. We drove through Chicago, Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Once we got to Pennsylvania it was like trees EVERYWHERE. The whole land is covered in trees! It is very pretty. We even drove through a town called Shippenville (we stopped there for gas) where my brother served for a few months on his mission! It's cool to see where my brother spent 2 years of his life!
Once we got to State College we checked into our hotel, and then checked into our apartment. It was a lot smaller than what I was expecting, so I was a little upset at first (completely different layout then the pictures and floor-plans online), but it is going to work for us! Our trailer with our stuff came Monday morning around 11am. Sadly we had some casualties from the journey. Our nice oak table broke along with one of our bookshelves :(. So we went to target and got us a new little table and some storage shelves for the kitchen. I don't have any pictures yet, because we are still working on putting things away.
Ben started orientation on Tuesday and already has had his first class today! So far he likes it, but he already has a ton of reading for his classes. That is about all we have been up to! Nothing too exciting except we had a fire alarm go off in our building last night (apparently it happens often), but we were able to meet some of our neighbors. Well I will start taking more pictures as we explore our new surroundings more! Stay tuned!

Gardens on campus near the alumni building. They were beautiful!