I Can Haz Roadtrip?

 The states are, in fact, as boring as you think.

1,138 miles.  About 21 hours with ridiculous St. Louis traffic (seriously, learn how to handle living on the Mississippi River).   I drove a giant toaster filled with enough possessions to make me wonder if we belonged on Hoarders that started to shake once it hit 70 mph.  But we made it to Austin in one piece without too much damage to the U-Haul.  Nothing that they charged me for anyway. 

Re-creation of our journey.  I got with that.

I don't have a ton of heart to write a giant post about every hour of the move.  You probably don't want to read it anyway.  But it was also a pretty easy drive without too many screw ups.  Once we got out of the northern half of Illinois and I stopped hitting things with my truck, things went pretty well.

Highlights & Insights:

1. I only hit two things. An average of one per ~575 miles?  I'll take it.  First was about 3 hours after I picked it up - I sideswiped a landscaping rock trying to back into my apartment building.  I also held up traffic on my street for about 10 minutes.  Pro tip: adjust your mirrors before you start driving it.  The next day after packing up M's stuff and leaving the city I scraped a concrete barrier pulling out of a gas station.  Thankfully no explosions ensued.

2. Illinois is pretty boring once you get out of Chicago.  Ohio has some competition.

3. St. Louis got 3" of rain in 90 minutes about 2 hours before we got there to stop for the night.  Unfortunately we had to drive through the city and thanks to highway flooding, it took us over 2 hours in 2 mph traffic to get through the mess. I'm pretty sure the Mississippi River has been around for a while, learn how to not let that happen eh?

4. Day 2 (St. Louis to Austin) was really long but Native American highways are awesome and have a 75 mph speed limit.  U-Hauls aren't really built for that speed but I made it work.

5. I finally experienced what comedian Mike Birbiglia was talking about.  Multiple times.  It's quite annoying.

6. We learned one of M's cats is Cherokee.

We got all our stuff in Friday afternoon and explored/unpacked a bit over the weekend when M's cousin was in town.  We're still unpacking but we've got pretty much every major thing set up. 

More from Austin later.