The trip to Illinois and the First Two Weeks in Champaign

It's been two weeks now since we left our home in Provo. Except for our missions and a summer here and there, we have lived in Provo, Utah since 1998. Neither of us ever intended to stay in Utah so long, but we got comfortable and before we knew it, ten years had gone by. Though we are sad to leave behind so many great friends, it was a good time to move. As always, packing and cleaning took much longer than we anticipated. I really thought we could get it done on our own, so I turned down many generous offers of help. Fortunately, we had friends show up anyway. We appreciate their help so much! What a blessing to have good friends and neighbors!

The trip was much better than we expected. We headed out around 10pm and Eliza was asleep in no time! She didn't wake up until 3am when we stopped at a motel to sleep. We pulled off in Green River and Rock Springs, Wyoming, but we weren't so tired that we wanted to pay $129.99 for a smoking room. The next small town we came consisted of a few gas stations and two motels, one of them without vacancies. The other one one, the one we stayed in, was a gem. It was actually a single-wide trailer divided into 4 motel rooms. The double bed made for a cozy night for the three of us. It was pretty chilly, but we opted to keep each other warm rather than sleep with the ancient space heater plugged in. However, forty bucks for four hours of sleep seemed like a steal!

Saturday was a lovely day for traveling in August without air conditioning. Really. It was either raining or overcast almost all day! Eliza was a happy passenger. We stopped every now and then to feed her, change her diaper, and let her roll around in the grass, then when she was in the car she slept. We stopped at a motel in Iowa on Saturday night, then rolled into Champaign late Sunday afternoon. We were so blessed that Ruby (our car who sometimes misbehaves, especially on long, hot trips) and baby Eliza were so well-behaved.

Since we were on a pretty tight schedule, there were only two days of house hunting before Mike's law school orientation. We saw lots of houses and crossed most of them off our list. When we finally narrowed it down to two homes, we spent an evening walking around their respective neighborhoods, talking to the neighbors and getting a feel for the places. Neither of the neighborhoods was bad, but we didn't feel like either of them were places we wanted to make a big investment in a home that we'd have to resell a few years down the road.

We had seen every listed house on the market in our price range, so we made an adjustment upward and checked the MLS listings again. Rather than going out with our realtor to see the homes, we spent an evening after orientation driving around to see the new houses and decide if we really wanted them on our list of potential homes. As we were driving to one house on the list, we passed another one that was for sale but wasn't on our list. We figured it must just be out of our price range, but grabbed a flyer about it anyway. We were excited to find that it was actually within our original, pre-adjustment price range. It seemed too good to be true. The outside looked great, but because it was less expensive than many houses we had looked at, we were afraid that there must be some severe problems with the interior. How happy we were to be wrong! The sellers need to be out quickly, so they had lowered the price twice in two months and we saw it just after the second reduction. We put an offer in on Saturday (for my birthday) and by Monday we had settled on a price. (We would have felt fine paying the asking price, but in what other transaction can you easily knock off a few thousand dollars?) We are so excited!

The house passed a home inspection with just a few small advisories, the mortgage was pre-approved, the current owners want to close quickly, and so do we. Pretty soon here we'll actually be in our very own home.

About that... we've looked high and low for places that we could rent on a month-to-month basis, so that we weren't stuck in a year-long lease, or even a 3-month lease, when all we needed was a few weeks buffer to find and close on our new home. If you were an apartment manager, and you had a bunch of vacant apartments, you'd be happy to get one month's rent instead of no rent at all, right? Wrong! If you thought, as we did, that an apartment manager would be happy to make an extra $700 or so off a vacant place, you've obviously never been an apartment manager in Champaign or Urbana.

So, for the last two weeks we have been very graciously hosted by a few new friends from the area. Eli and Stephanie, James and Monica, thank you so much! We hope we can still be friends. We owe you big time!

Well that's probably enough about us for now. We'll post some pictures from our trip once we're on our own computer. For now, here's a few pictures of our house: