The New Place

The first part of our big move took place over the past week.  Megan, her mom, and I drove the 900 or so miles from Denver to St. Louis.  Aside from the fact that my car had no A/C and I melted like a popsicle on the 4th of July, the drive wasn't too bad.  We did encounter the merging of the great 17- and 13-year Cicada awakenings at our stop in Columbia, MO.  Megan was less than enthused.  Apparently Cicada's also make great ice cream.  They were everywhere and the sound made me think we were encountering the eighth plague in Egypt (the one with all the locusts).

We finally arrived at my sister, Amanda, and brother-in-law, Brad's house in Southern Illinois right outside of St. Louis.  They were gracious enough to put us up in their awesome house for the weekend and let us store all the stuff we brought from the 303 in their basement for the summer.  We had three days to find our apartment for the coming year.  I honestly don't know what we would have done without all of the help from my sister Amanda.  St. Louis is very confusing when you first get there and she offered to be our guide and drive us around on our great apartment search.  The city has all these different living communities (Soulard, Central West End, and South City to name a few) that we had to navigate in order to find our prospective apartment and without Amanda I don't think we would have been able to get around to all of them to see what they had to offer.  Over the course of Thursday and Friday we made countless phone calls to set up our viewing of fifteen different apartments across all the living communities.  Some were old and some were new.  Quite a few were retro and cool.  Most looked safe, but some, well....not so much.

We were starting to feel quite discouraged as we had visited 14 out of our 15 apartments and had not found one place that fit us.  Then as soon as we walked into #15, Megan and I looked at each other and nodded in agreement.  We filled out the application within the half hour and are just waiting for our official confirmation.   We picked a 730 sq. ft. garden level space just on the outskirts of downtown STL.  The building is about 100 years old and used to be a stove factory.  Plus it has a good-sized back patio just for Gizmo.

Speaking of Gizmo... While we were in STL, she hung out with Aunt Sara and my parents.  We missed her on the trip, but thankfully Sara and my parents sent us lots of updates.

Megan and her mom head back to Denver tomorrow.  I spend the week in St. Louis and then will head to Chicago for five weeks, all for my Teach for America training.

Luke