AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!

Today we are packing our camper and getting ready to move to ND. I'm pretty excited for the change and the move. It will be fun to be home with my kids and see my husband every day. He has been working out there for over two months now and as it is a nine hour drive he only comes home for a couple days at a time. This last time he was gone for three weeks, the. longest. three. weeks. EVER. I'm pretty sure we haven't been apart that long since we met five years ago.

When he got this job we decided we would try to move the family out there because he is planning on working there for several years and living nine hours apart with me raising three little kids on my own is no one's idea of fun. As housing is extremely hard to come by out there it has taken us until now for everything to fall into place. Eric was able to rent a lot in a small quiet trailer park, I quit my job, we found renters for the upstairs of our house and Eric found the most perfect camper. We are officially red-necks because now our house cost less than either of our vehicles, and it has wheels. It is going to be fun though! The camper is great though, he looked long and hard to find the best deal on the biggest camper we could find. As long as we will be living in it it had to have the most room possible. We started out thinking a 5th wheel would probably be the best choice but it turns out they start out at twice the cost of a normal travel trailer and only have one bed, not okay for a family of five. We ended up finding a 38' Coachman camper trailer that sleeps nine. Here is a little tip for you camper shoppers out there: unless you want to fold up kid's beds every morning, find a camper that sleeps a lot of people. It usually means there are more permanent beds and there is a smaller chance your kids will be sleeping on the dining room table. Our kids will be sleeping on bunk beds in the back bedroom. They are pretty excited about their new beds and tried them out while I was trying to make them yesterday.

I don't have time to get any pictures up but will try to catch up once we are settled. We visited Eric out there for a couple days last week and the only way I can describe what it is like out there is a spectacle. There are so many people trying to live out there to work in the oil industry the town is packed full. Any place that has a little space someone has backed a camper into. If there is a little more room, ten campers are parked. The town RV park is completely full and every hotel room within two hours has been booked for over a year. When we went out to visit I had to get a hotel room in Bismark, nearly three hours drive away. Houses now sell for twice what they do in any other part of the country. I know a guy that is moving out there with home construction companies and has been promised two years of work just working on new home construction. Part of the reason we are living in a camper for now is that we don't want to buy one of the few homes that are on the market out there and then five years down the road be stuck with a second house that is worth less than we owe on it.

I'm excited for the new adventure and can't wait to see what life is like out in the "Wild West!"