After driving for hours in the cold, Chad got super paranoid about the cats. We were stopping every hour so that he could run back and make sure the cats were still alive. Penny seemed to be keeping warm, she was snuggled up under a blanket behind the passenger seat. Sunny on the other hand wasn't as catlike. He was in the very back of the car under the rear windshield, meowing, freezing, and had snot dripping down and all over his face. Poor Sunny :( Chad immediately brought him up front with us to warm up. Then of course we missed our little Penny. So Chad decided it would be best to pull off the highway and pull into a dark, sketchy looking park next to a lake where the rapers were surely waiting to drown us. Clearly the paranoia hadn't left yet. He scooped up Penny and then all 5 of us were together again!
Shorty after we got the cats up with us we realized that our power inverter wasn't really charging anything, just barely keeping things going. As we tried to see what was going on with the fuses the one just stopped working. So we plugged our things into the other one and blew it. Back to square one. We pulled off the highway into a gas station hoping that they would have some fuses. Rational thinking was long gone at this point and paranoia was the fueling emotion for all decision making on my part. Chad pulled into some weird gas station parking lot, and I spotted, what was surely a man robbing the gas station. He had a black hoodie on with the hood up over his face and was just standing in the doorway. No one else was in the parking lot. I started freaking out, can't we just go somewhere else? This guy has a gun! We are going to die! We just dodged death at the creepy park for heavens sake! Nope. The fuses took priority over everything at that point so Chad went in. I sat in the truck with the phone ready to call the police with my eyes glued on the front door. A few minutes later Chad came out with a fuse. Turns out the robber was just a homeless guy looking for change. Whoops, my bad. We were able to get one of the fuses going again just enough to charge our cell phones, as long as we weren't using the phones. So we were only to Chicago and watching movies on our laptop was now no longer an option. It was going to be an exciting time.
Thankfully the rest of the night passed uneventfully. We drove most of it, only stopping for a few hours at a rest stop to nap in our truck, our paranoia wouldn't allow us to leave the truck unaccompanied for the night to actually sleep in a hotel. The next morning we woke up to find that we had no cell service. In fact, for the entire state of Nebraska we had no service. I guess the good people of Nebraska have never been introduced to the wonders of a cell phone. Chad was finally able to understand my intense hatred for Nebraska. It is LONG, and boring, and no cell service!
We made it through Nebraska and were finally in Colorado. We had initially thought that we would go around the Rockies, we were nervous about how our truck would do on the mountains pulling our car. But going around meant an extra 6 hours. Plus, the mountains would be beautiful to drive through, right? So through the Rockies we went! Of course as we got there the sun was just going down so our beautiful view was now just darkness. As we started our first gradual ascent the truck was making some very weird noises and slowing way down. Chad panicked, "There's something wrong with the truck! We broke the truck! We broke the truck!" Luckily before pulling over and really freaking out we realized that our truck was just AWFUL at climbing up the mountains. We were going up at 35 mph and then I panicked all the way down each and every single hill. I texted multiple people letting them know that I was going to die going down these ridiculously steep mountains before I could even make it to Utah. It was at this point too that the animals started to freak out themselves. Sunny was a hot mess, pacing back and forth over top of us, meowing and crying. Rukia refused to lay down anymore and started panicking and shaking at any little movement. Penny started crying and crying and crying and then pooped under my seat. We were quite the group. Somehow we all managed to make it through the mountains then pulled over and all of us slept for a few hours, in our truck with the engine running of course!
After a quick nap we were up and going! We were so, so close. But at the same time we were so, so tired. We switched drivers every hour so that we could each get a little sleep. My favorite part of this stretch of road was the caution sign warning me of how my truck could tip over. Awesome. That's just what I need. I was able to maneuver through some mountains, without having a panic attack, and managed to keep the truck in it's upright position. While I may have been stressing over the driving the view was amazing. The red mountains were such a sight after all the driving. We we're seeing red and we were excited! Finally, around 11am Wednesday morning, we had made it. We were tired, and in the same clothes that we had left in. Super gross, I know. We literally stopped only to get gas and food. Some of this due to our determination to get to St. George, but mostly due to the extreme fear of leaving out truck.
Once in St. George we headed straight to our condo to sign the lease. Only hesitation? We had never actually seen all of it before...
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