Josh, Anne-Marie, and Aylia Colwell’s Gazette

Day Eleven (Thursday, July 12):

It is arrival day. We are impatient to get there, but again don’t get on the road until about 8:00. Anne-Marie starts out behind the wheel and makes me nervous by driving faster than I comfortable with (from a law enforcement standpoint rather than safety). But she is not the fastest on the road, and there are no problems even though we see several speed traps. We stop somewhere in the middle of north Florida on I-75 to fill the car’s tank and empty ours and swap drivers. Although it is a relatively short day of driving, it seems interminable. We skirt by Gainseville, so we don’t actually see or go through any cities until we arrive in Orlando.

When we arrive at the house, it is hot and smelly. Three bags of garbage have been fermenting in the garage and the odor has permeated the place. Two of the three toilets are broken. The pool is a lovely shade of algal green. Old pet stains on the carpet seem worse than I remembered. We turn the thermostat down to start cooling the place off, put the garbage out (we’ve apparently missed the collection by an hour or two), install our trusty inflatable mattress and start cleaning the pool. Nate, who has taken care of the place in our absence (until the previous week) comes over and reminds me how to operate everything. Our DSL modem has arrived, so I set about hooking it up. Amazingly, though we don’t have a phone to plug in, I’m able to get us on line in just a few minutes. Within an hour a thunderstorm rolls through and lightning apparently fries the modem. No more internet.

There is a flurry of phone calls associated with the billing and payment of the moving company. We go to the grocery store and get some paper bowls and some basic food items for breakfast. Next we go to Bank of America to open a local bank account. The bank is surrounded by crime scene tape when we get there and there are several police cars in the parking lot. Through the windows we see police officers interviewing bank employees. We try the nearest branch (”at 50 and Econ” we are told by a policewoman), but it has just closed.

We are invited to Dan and Judith Britt’s for dinner and are treated to a wonderful evening. They loan us a card table and folding chairs and a lamp so we have a place to sit and some light (there are no light fixtures in any of the bedrooms, though this is easily fixed). We begin compiling our shopping list of things we need for the house.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 16th, 2007 at 6:56 am and is filed under Josh's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.