Moving into the Chicago house

Saturday was the middle day of our drive, and was the longest day.  But the drive from Chicago again took about 7 or 8 hours (for what's normally about 5).  Just the standard deal with the baby :)

We stayed in a hotel downtown Sunday night, then on Monday the movers came to move all of our stuff into the house.  Charlie went into work for a half day Monday - he had an orientation for the office to attend.  KPMG is in a new building in Chicago - the Aon Building, and it is certainly state of the art. After all the boxes came out, the inside of our house mostly looked like this.

The permanent drive to Chicago part 2

Saturday morning on our trek from Jersey to Chicago we left the luxurious Western PA Microtel Inn and headed toward Eaton/Dayton via Columbus.  If you're a geography wizard and are trying to figure this out - you're correct, neither Columbus nor Dayton are not on the way from New Jersey to Chicago.  But we wanted to drop Griffey off at Katie's parents so he wasn't stressed out by being in the house when the movers came Monday.  We also got the chance to see friends and family on the way.

We entered Columbus shortly after the Buckeye game versus Cal started - so there was a bit of traffic, but not too bad.  We stopped there to see our friends Bryan and Kristen, who were celebrating their son Will's first birthday that Saturday.  It presented some good photo opportunities for us.  Charlie and Bryan were housemates for over 5 years between college, grad school and starting off in Columbus, and Kristen and Katie were sorority sisters.

Griffey also was a fan favorite - he had a new friend in Kristen's niece for the whole birthday party!

After Will's birthday party, we drove down to Dayton to see Charlie's sister Abby.  This was Abby's first chance to meet Brayden, and it was our first chance in a long time to eat LaRosa's pizza!  A win-win!

From there, we drove to Eaton and stayed at Katie's parents house.  It was our last night with Griffey for a while, so we were sad to leave him in the morning but at the same time excited to move into our house in Chicago!

The permanent drive to Chicago - part 1

So it's been a bit crazy since we moved from New Jersey - we haven't had much time to post, even though there has been a lot of things to post about!  We'll try to start back where we left off - which was we had just spent our last day in New Jersey.

Friday we checked out of the hotel we'd stayed at in a nearby town, then had to go back to the house and do some final clean up - spackling, vacuuming and the like.  We left mid-afternoon and made the 5 hour drive to a hotel a little North of Pittsburgh.  We say 5 hour drive with a smirk on both of our faces!  Ramsey to Pittsburgh is a 5 hour drive for Charlie when he feels like going that long without a stop.  But when you have a 6-week old baby, a 5-hour drive becomes a 8 or 9 hour ordeal!  An hour in, and Brady was hungry again - and certainly not timid about letting us know!  The drive made us really appreciate the stops where there is a restaurant right off the exit, and despise the ones where the nearest restaurant is 1.8 miles away.  Those 1.5 miles make a big difference when you have less than 2 hours in between stops!  The blue signs should be required to note things like this on the highway.

The drive was also sort of weird for Charlie, as he drove right by the spot he got in an accident while driving our first car out to Chicago just a week earlier.  We made it past that point, though, and did accomplish a first - Brady's first time in a public restaurant!  We stopped at the Primanti Brothers, which is a pretty famous restaurant that started in Pittsburgh many years ago.  They put vinegar-based cole slaw and french fries in the sandwich at Primanti Brothers - and the combination is delicious.  We left Griffey in his cage in the car, went in for a quick bite at 9 PM.  Brady thoroughly enjoyed the experience - he is a bit of a flirt and was laughing it up with our waitress!

He also seemed to like the hotel room!

Griffey's enthusiasm was more subdued.  But he was a very good dog on the trip - especially since he had to stay in the car while we ate at Primanti Bros. - so he earned the right to snuggle up under the covers after the long drive.

That was the first part of the drive - which seems enough for one post.  Next post is the rest of the trip!

Go Reds!

Our last day in New Jersey

Friday was our last day in New Jersey!  And by the time this post is scheduled, we are already in Chicago, likely in a very messy house with lots of organizing to be done!  The movers came and got our stuff in New Jersey from Tuesday through Thursday to pack and load all of our stuff, so Wednesday was our last night sleeping in the house in Ramsey.  Each night our dog Griffey was on high alert as he got home and some things were packed into boxes (Tuesday night), everything but the bed was packed (Wednesday) and then nothing was left (Thursday).  Thursday night, we stayed in a hotel room in Allendale (town right next to Ramsey).  Moving here over 2 years ago was a fun adventure for the 3 of us - and the next few days will be a fun adventure for what has now become a party of 4.  With a 6-week old baby, the drive will move at a much slower pace :).

We're very excited to move to Chicago, but it is a little difficult to leave the place we've called home for 2+ years.  Sure, there are some things we won't miss about New Jersey - such as:

• Yankee fans (at least some of them) who seem to think it's their God-given right to be in the playoffs every single year,
• the way roads like Route 17 are set up so you can't make left turns and have to drive 2 miles past where you want to go just to turn around and go 2 miles back to get there (don't miss it on the way back - because this could end up costing you 8 additional miles of driving),
• the fact that we couldn't eat food from the Midwest - don't let anyone out here convince you otherwise, it's not better here.  The rare and more expensive dinners - yeah, they're possibly better in NY/NJ.  But for almost any type of your medium-to-lower priced meals, where we grew up and where we're going is much better.  Delis are the one notable exception to this rule; nothing holds a candle to NJ/NY delicatessens, 
• the poor cell phone / smart phone internet reception here.  Charlie has always noticed the difference, and his few trips to Chicago confirmed how much better it is there, and his mom noticed how bad it was when she was here,
• not being able to do any shopping on Sundays, except for grocery stores all stores and malls are closed on Sunday due to Bergen County being one of the last counties in America to still have what they call a Blue Law which outlaws all shopping on Sundays. 
• not being able to pump your own gas at the gas stations, although pregnant Katie really liked this because she didn't have to get out of the car, it just doesn't seem to be a job that is worth paying people once all the gas stations introduced pay at the pump.  And because you hand your card to a guy who then swipes it for you, we have heard on the news that there are a lot of incidents where credit card numbers have been taken from a side-swiper and the people don't realize it, which this would never happen in the rest of the country because you swipe your own card.  
• being so far away from where many of our friends and family are.

But New Jersey is the place our son was born, we've been married for longer during our time here than in Columbus (though not by much), and it's the longest Griffey has lived anywhere in his short life!  We did a lot of cool things while we were out here, and we'll miss that proximity to so much that the Northeast has to offer.  Griff will certainly miss the large backyard, but he'll like our new house (with a smaller yard) in Chicago, too!

Various "last time living in Jersey" things we did:

• Charlie taking the (really) long way home from work one night to get a meal at his favorite buffalo wing joint of all-time, Candlelight Inn, a couple of weeks before we moved.
• Seeing one last out-of-town visitor the week before we left - Julie, who coincidentally worked with both Charlie (at KPMG) and then Katie (at AEP).  Julie was in New York for a trip for AEP, and was kind enough to take the train up here to meet Brayden.  As promised - she got a picture with the baby on the blog!  

• Seeing friends Brian, Adrienne and their 11-month old daughter Charlotte came down for a quick visit to meet Brayden for the first time last Sunday morning.  Although we were an hour away from them, we always enjoyed meeting up with them and will definitely miss them. 

 

• Finishing all the frozen meals Charlie's mom had made to help us get through the early weeks with Brayden - since both our parents have been up here so much since he was born, this was actually the time when these meals were the most helpful!
• Spending Griffey's last 3 days at Best Friends Pet Care ("Doggie Day Camp") while the movers were here.  Griffey gets a report card each day, and he played with his best buddy Kirby most of the days.  He also got to have one last play day with his other friends (Charlie's co-worker's dogs), Dallas and Benji.

• Saying goodbye to both sets of co-workers.  Katie brought Brayden into her Toys R Us office on Thursday to introduce Brayden to her department and to say goodbye, which was really sad for her because she learned a lot during her time there and met some very nice people.  

• Eating Thursday meals from our most-frequented places in Ramsey.  Lunch was from Goldberg's famous bagels, which is about the best Deli place you'll find.  Dinner was pizza from Kinchley's Tavern, which we haven't gone to quite as often the past year, but was easily our most visited restaurant before Katie was pregnant.
• Walking through the house on North Central one last time Friday to spackle the walls and do some final cleaning.

So Arrividercci, Adieux, Adios, Auf Widersehen, Sayonara and Goodbye to New Jersey from the Mowry family!

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!

Brayden's first trip - meeting Great-Grandma over Labor Day weekend 2012

To round out the visit from Charlie's parents, we went down to St. Michael's, Maryland, so Brayden could meet his great-grandmother, Dorothy.

St. Michael's is in the Chesapeake Bay area, and we've been there a few times to visit Charlie's grandmother since we moved to New Jersey.  Charlie's parents could drive down there and then be closer to home, so they could head back to Cincinnati from there.  This was a good test for us - it was the first time bringing Brayden for a longer car ride.  He's been in his car seat quite a few times - on the way home from the hospital and for his and Katie's doctor checkups.  But this is a 4-hour drive if you don't stop at all.  And with a 4-week old baby, let's just say you will stop on a drive of that length.  Add a 4-year old dachshund to the mix, and do the drive on the Friday of Labor Day weekend, and door-to-door time was closer to 7 hours!  Still, the drive was a success, and we made it down to Grandma Dorothy's house in time for dinner!

We weren't there long, but we had fun hanging out at "Sei Han So" (the name of Dorothy's house).  On account of having a baby and a dog in tow, Charlie and Katie got the honor of sleeping in the upstairs bedroom for the first time ever (with Tom and Leslie taking the bed in the attic).  Katie and Leslie even made it into St. Michael's on Saturday morning to do a little shopping!  Tom and Charlie were again fine watching the baby.  We got a few family pictures - first up, 4 generations of Mowry's...

... and a dog!  When Leslie was taking this picture, Griffey decided that it wasn't fair for him to miss out on the excitement, and he jumped right onto Dorothy's lap!  That's OK, we don't want the first baby of the family to feel too left out :)

We also got some Michigan pictures in, as this Saturday was the first chance for Brady to watch Michigan football.  Tom and Leslie were already recruiting him for freshman classes in 2031...

... Unfortunately, Michigan did not impress Brady very much with the beat-down they got at the hands of Alabama!

We also got some pictures outside by the dock.  Griffey loved running around with Charlie in the expansive backyard - after that, he decided the 7-hour car ride was totally worth it!  And we took a picture by the tree Charlie used to climb (and once unexpectedly sang the Star Spangled Banner as a 5-year old).

And, the dock out back where Charlie, Peter, Abby and cousins used to catch crabs for Grandma's crab cakes...

We couldn't stay long - with the upcoming move to Chicago, we had a lot to do.  We left a little after lunch and again faced a drive that seemed longer than you'd expect, but was fun to do with our little family of 4.  It was good to see Grandma Dorothy with the newest addition to the family.

P.S. - Charlie also got to cross another restaurant from the Man vs. Food TV show off his list - we stopped on the campus of Rutgers University for dinner.  Rutgers is famous for their "Grease Trucks" - and if you think that sounds unhealthy, well, you'd be right.  These trucks are famous for crazy combinations and including the sides (i.e., french fries) inside the sandwich - R U Hungry being the most well-known.  They aren't very expensive either, which is a necessity for college fare.  We just split one sandwich - the #11, which was titled the "Fat Vastardi".  It has Gyro meat, chicken fingers, mozzarella sticks, french fries, lettuce, tomatoes and cucumber sauce.  It was yummy, but probably wouldn't be a good idea to keep on your regular diet!