Madison was great. Bill, Mary, and Kristen were fantastic hosts. Bill gave us a personal tour of Promega where we got to see a real freeze drier and a bunch of awesome labs. The main building of Promega is really pretty and he did a wonderful job collecting all sorts of neat artifacts and furniture from around the world. He obviously put a lot of thought and effort into personalizing the company space while showing great concern for his employees by providing a gym, sauna, yoga room, steam room, and jacuzzi. By the end of the tour I was re-thinking my college career and wishing I had gone into some sort of bio-engineering stuff that they do there.
Bill also showed us through his work in progress house. It should be finished in a couple of months and like the rest of hist company he put a lot of effort into every part. From the three story stone fire place to the geo-thermal heating and cooling system, every material was carefully chosen. I'm really hoping to re-visit Madison when it's all finished to see how it turns out!
From Madison we pushed on down to NC rather quickly. Monday night we pulled another long drive and slept (more like rested as the front cab and the couch in the back are not very comfortable) in the van behind a KFC in Kentucky for about 6 hours. We pulled into Hot Springs, NC after an unfortunate hour detour after we both missed the turn up to our uncle's house. The detour was through the mountains and the road was very pretty but extremely windy and it got old really fast in our giant moving van. We finally made it to Uncle Gene's house where he promptly took us out to lunch and then swept us up to show off his newly acquired Santa Clause collection. There are few words to describe this Santa collection, Christmas in July was an understatement. There had to have been over 200 Santas in this church with one of those complete mini-train sets and those little Christmas scenes with ceramic buildings and people also he had boxes of original tin soldiers in their original packaging. The scary thing was that what we saw was only about half of the collection that had been left to my uncle from a member of his church. If anyone knows what to do with this sort of stuff, ideas and suggestions are welcome.
Later on that afternoon we made it to our Grandparent's house and finally kicked our feet up for the night. The next day Evan and I unpacked the moving van and moseyed on over to the farm where my mom grew up riding horses. Why did we go to this farm with so much stuff to do you might ask? To finally get the little red sled out of the moving van...what better place to do it than a farm and who better to help you/come with some ideas about how to get that thing off the truck than a farmer. We got out to the farm and within an hour, the little red sled was free! Bill, the farmer, had a bank that we were able to back the moving van up to that was no kidding, almost flush with the bed of the truck. It couldn't have been more perfect. Evan backed it right up and drove the sled right off the van and then promptly ran out of gas. It was just as easy to get if off as it was to get it on, but boy are we extremely happy and lucky to have a sail boat builder and a farmer on two sides of the country who are just a phone call away from assisting with all of our crazy Thilo shenanigans.
Evan's roommate finally got in today after a long night of driving. Today we got the house a little more organized and unpacked. Tomorrow Evan gets hot water, internet, and cable! I'm heading up to the mountain house tomorrow with Grandaddy, Grandjo and Mikie of course. Saturday I plan on going to get a bathing suit at the mall and probably checking in on Evan at the house. Sunday I'm going to make my way down to Florida to visit my long time friend from St. Andrew's College and her boyfriend. I'll stay with them for a few weeks before I start to figure out how to get up to visit Stephanie in Baltimore. That's all for now, quite the mouthful but we've been really busy and it's hard to sit down and do this every night!
