1400 Miles Later

As many of our readers know, our updates have been sparse over the last few months. We hope to be better about updates over the coming weeks as we will have more free time. As a brief update, Engineers R and J have moved to Champaign, Illinois for the summer. We have moved the 1,411 miles for Engineer R to pursue an internship with Caterpillar. While Engineer R is working Engineer J will be thus occupied with 17 online credits of school, in pursuit of a technical sales marketing minor.

The next few paragraph will focus on the events and travels that have occurred since we left Logan, Utah. Most of this was written in “rant” style by Engineer J in the times were no Internet was present and frustrations were high. You have been warned.

The days were rough and the rough kept goin'.

The first few days of travel were pretty much as expected. Long drives past towns with two radio stations: the good old country station and a station playing 1980s rock music. All this, in the most desolate land you’ve ever seen out your window. It took a total of 23 hours to drive from Logan to Champaign with brief interludes in hotels. Not much more can be said about the drive because frankly nothing eventful really happened, which is a good thing as well. Overall, we arrived in Champaign very tired but also in one piece, at least physically.

Here are some pictures. If I had to describe Wyoming it would be “brown”, Nebraska would be “windy,” (and also brown) and Iowa would be “water tower” ( I guess that’s two words but you get the picture)

Nebraska. That's pretty much all there is.

 

Winter Quarters LDS Temple. (Omaha, NE)

Altoona, IA. We visited their church branch here.

Crossing the Mississippi River. The picture makes it look much smaller than it really is.

 

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It was what happened upon arrival that was perhaps the most stressful. The apartment that we had agreed to lease from two girls, who were supposedly law school graduates, were not there to let us into our apartment. We spent three hours sitting on a curb trying to get into touch with them but to no avail as did not answer there phones. Come to find out that one was “passed out” (in her own words), probably from a post-graduate hangover (this was 6pm at night). 

We also tried to call a maintenance man who had an “angry” hick accent, that made him to sound like he was yelling at you. Finally, after some hairs were pulled and some tears shed, we got into our apartment via an emergency key. Relief! Or so we thought. The apartment was in such a state that it was unlivable, and we immediately were overcome with stress and anxiety about our new very, very, humble abode.  I don’t really want to go into the details of what was wrong with the apartment, because they could take up the entire post, but needless to say it would have cost about $700 to clean the place. So, in defense to our safety, our time, and our sanity we set out to find a new apartment. 

This task of finding a new apartment was mostly undertaken by Engineer J,
as Engineer R was working 8 hours a day at his internship. This was not the best because Engineer J spent hours and hours over the course of three days looking for apartments instead of actually doing homework. This caused a great time of stress for both of us, especially for Engineer R because he was worried about Engineer J trying to juggle too much. However, a fortune cookie from the previous night did provide a great deal of wisdom: "Life’s greatest gift is a sympathetic wife." You can’t make this kind of stuff up! Anyway, on Wednesday, three days after we arrived we were able to secure a quite posh apartment that was a hundred times better. 

Here are some pictures of the old apartment (unfortunately it is impossible to convey over the Internet the smell of cigarettes and cat urine that met you as you enter the apartment):

You know. Just your usual trash heap.

 

The picture does not capture the crustiness.

 

Here is a picture of the new apartment:

In order to not disclose all the details of where we live, we are only posting this one photo.

The new apartment was indeed quite posh but it was one of the only apartments that was available and was priced quite low, so we got it for a steal of a deal. For about a day everything went quite fantastically. Engineer J was finally able to catch up on homework and Engineer R’s internship has finally picked up so he could began his projects (the first few days were orientation and a lot of waiting for security clearance). However, on Friday, lightning struck… literally. Yep, a lighting bolt struck our building and fried our internet router. I mean seriously!!!! How does this kind of stuff happen?! So Engineer J was stuck at home waiting for a tech guy to fix the internet unable to do homework again. Keep in mind this was 5th day internet struck out,  out of 6 days! Needless to say, the internet was fixed and all things seem to be back to normal, at least for now.

Regardless of all the unexpected roadblocks in the first few days these last few weeks have been much better. 

We will post another blog post soon with more updates on recent events such as Engineer R's birthday.