Twenty-two hours

That's how much actual driving time it took us to get from our former home in Georgia to our new home in northern Pennsylvania.

I brought new human beings into the world in less time than that.

Here's a partial breakdown:

Saturday: Pack until almost midnight and spend the day searching for our cat, knowing we won't be able to find him when we leave at 4 am.

Saturday, 11 pm: Decide to leave at 5 am instead of 4 am.

Sunday 6 am: leave . . . without our cat whom we were never able to find

8 am: stop for Lauren to throw up

9:30 am: stop for Ethan to throw up and PRAY it's not a stomach virus

11 am: stop because Ethan is nauseated and thinks he's about to throw up again. He doesn't.

12 pm: stop for lunch and feed cheeseburgers to my two children who just threw up. Yeah, I'm brilliant.

Surprisingly, they are both fine and have no more nausea/vomiting episodes. Apparently, they just both got carsick despite neither of them ever having been carsick before. This seems even more odd given that they got carsick in Georgia but not in West Virginia, which has more curves than Dolly Parton.

7 pm: decide to stop for the night when we get to Pittsburgh

8 pm: find out it's 3 more hours to Pittsburgh and decide to stop for the night in Flatwoods, West Virginia because we see a hotel. That was all the reason we needed at that point.

Monday 10:15 am: leave hotel two hours later than planned. There was a huge breakfast buffet; what more can I say?

It took us another EIGHT hours on Monday to finally reach our new home.

We new we were getting close when the mountain roads got steeper and the wildlife got stranger. Two hours out, we passed a HUGE truck full of pigs. About 90 minutes from town, an eagle almost flew into my car. It could have been a hawk, but until I find proof that they pump the mice full of steroids here, I'm sticking with my story that it was an eagle. Then about 45 minutes away from town, we passed a llama farm. We knew we must be getting close.

Finally, at 6:15 Monday evening, we arrived at our new home.

We knew we were in the right place because we saw a sign as we entered the county that said, "Potter County, God's Country." That was a real relief because we had passed Prosperity, Pa several hours back, and I was a bit concerned that we had driven right past it.

I figure God's country trumps prosperity, right?