An eventful trip to Chicago - weekend of September 8th

I (Charlie) made one last trip to Chicago before we moved.  The intent of this trip was three-fold:

1) Drive my car and a few of our things to our new house,
2) "Check in" to the new house - as Friday the 7th was the first official date of our lease,
3) Go to his friend's wedding in Chicago.

Then Sunday, I'd fly back and we'd drive the second car to Chicago the next weekend.

Unfortunately, things didn't go so well with #1 from above.  I left Thursday afternoon/evening, and planned to drive about half of the 12-13 hours that night.  About 4.5 hours into the 12 hour drive, the tire-tread from a semi in front of me flew off, smashed my fender and went right under my car.  It pretty much shredded the underbelly of my car and, for good measure, dislodged the bumper on it's way out the back of the underneath of my car.  Luckily, I was fine and was able to pull over on the off-ramp of an exit nearby.  My car, though, was not fine by any stretch of the imagination.  I'm so glad we have Triple-A, as it made things really easy to figure out who to call.  Katie called the police nearby, and my car was towed, I was checked into a hotel and on the phone with the insurance company just over an hour after the 10 PM accident.  The car won't be ready for a few more weeks, so logistics of getting it will be difficult, but, the good thing is that I'm fine even if the car isn't.

I got a rental car by noon the next day, moved my stuff over to that car, and finished off the drive to Chicago the next day.  Luckily, our real estate agent was able to meet me at the house much later than I'd anticipated, and I was able to get moved into our new house!  Unfortunately, I realized about 800 miles too late that I'd brought the air mattress but not the pump, so I spent the next two nights sleeping on the floor.

Even though so many things when wrong, still, it was a good trip!  I'm excited about our new house, and I got to go to an old college friend's wedding.  Tommy (a fraternity brother from Miami who's a year younger than me) and Lauren were actually both on the Miami University traveling trip through Europe back in the summer of 2001 - the same trip where Katie and I met!  So they're (at least) the 2nd "Miami Merger" that was on that trip!  Lauren and a group of 4 or 5 other girls spent a lot of time with Tommy, me and 3 or 4 other friends on that trip.  But they weren't dating at first, and in fact were just really good friends for the rest of college and even well after college when they both coincidentally moved to Chicago.  They started dating after their 5-year reunion back at Miami, and the rest as they say is history.  It was neat to see that the relationship of two of my friends had turned into a great marriage.  The only bummer was that Katie couldn't attend, but it was about a week too early for Brayden to travel.  I'm excited that we'll get to see them more now that we're moving to Chicago!