Road Trip to Notre Dame

Last week I (Ryan) left early Wednesday (August 21) morning to begin a road trip to Notre Dame. For all of you who don't know, I'll be attending Notre Dame in a PhD program for Developmental Psychology. We plan on being in Notre Dame for five years. But we had to get out here first to begin our adventure.

Bright and early Wednesday morning my Mom, Dad, brother and I hopped into a Penske moving truck and our Versa. We excitedly began our journey by getting a little breakfast and topping off our vehicles.

We expected Day One to be pretty long. We were hoping to get to Lincoln, NE; a little more than half the distance to South Bend, IN. We expected about a 14-hour day. 14 hours on I-80... Once we bounced onto I-80 in Utah, we did not deviate that course the whole way to Lincoln (and eventually the whole way to South Bend).

If you've ever driven on I-80 through Wyoming and Nebraska you probably know what I'm going to say next. The drive was extremely boring. Wyoming was brown and mostly flat and Nebraska was flat and flat. Mark and I drove the Versa so we entertained each other by stopping on most of the state lines along the way. We had also gone grocery shopping to stock up on road trip goodies. We got plenty of sunflower seeds, beef jerky, and some sugar snap peas (one of Mark's favorite snacks). We also jammed to our music. At times we tried to play a game we affectionately called, "No Skippies!" Basically the game means that you turn your iPod on "all music" and you are not allowed to skip any song. Yikes. We reminisced with some classics, and we suffered through some instrumental music not made for driving. We decided instrumental music could be skipped for our sakes. We realized that we didn't have enough music, even if we played "No Skippies!" the whole time. We ended up just picking and choosing albums to rock to. One of our surprising favorites was Eiffel 65, Europop. Good memories.

Mark catching up on some Zzzz

Somewhere in the middle of Nebraska Mark and I did some exploring off the side of the road.

Our favorite drink! Limon Pepino (cucumber lime Gatorade)

By the end of Day One, and when I say the end, I mean, about 11pm, we finally get into our nice hotel room. Thankfully we all made it through the first day.

Day Two consisted of some better scenery through the rest of Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and finally Indiana to South Bend. Day Two had considerably less driving, but we had to unpack everything when we got to our apartment.

We made a quick lunch stop at Gramma's Kitchen off I-80 somewhere in Iowa near the World's Largest Truck Stop! And off we went! We blew through Illinois without stopping, but Mark and I had some difficulties trying to get onto the toll road to take us to South Bend. After making a U-turn at the next exit three miles ahead, we cruised to South Bend.

We were really excited when we starting seeing Notre Dame Football billboards. I knew we were in ND Nation!

We finally made it to our new apartment around 7pm on Thursday. Our two days of driving felt like two weeks of driving. We drove 1500 miles from South Jordan to South Bend in two days. Another miracle.

Once we got there and I checked in, we started unpacking. Thankfully a number of my neighbors swarmed the moving truck and made quick work of our boxes. We enjoyed chatting a little bit afterward and found out that there are 14 LDS families in our complex and all the couples in the complex have kids. It's a very homogenous group.

We were able to move enough boxes around to make sleeping areas and we hit the sack.

Friday morning I had an orientation for the Psychology program. I jumped in the shower only to realize we hadn't unpacked the shower curtain. But that didn't matter because I couldn't find the mechanism to turn the shower on. A bath it was. I quickly got ready and drove to campus, got lost, asked a campus ministry priest how to get where I was going, sped walked to Haggar Hall, and arrived late to my orientation.

Let me tell you a little something about Notre Dame campus, first, it is beautiful. Old buildings, tradition, sacrifice, and dedication exude throughout the campus. Second, all the buildings look the same with very little identification, besides the golden dome and the basilica, I have no idea which building is which. I have now been lost enough that I know my way around, at least to the places I need to get to. Third, because of the age of buildings and the fact they are all halls, not buildings (e.g., Haggar Hall, McGinis Hall, Flanner Hall, etc.) I imagine I'm at Hogwarts. This perception solidified Sunday evening when my family and I walked around campus. All the undergraduates gathered for some sort of [wizard] games. They chanted the names of their halls, calling out to other halls in some sort of brouhaha. I am no longer an undergrad, so I am above those silly things....hahaha. That reminds me, I don't know what it's like at other universities, but anytime the graduate students talk about the undergrads they make the undergrads seem like an inferior species. I think it's funny.

Over the weekend, I mentioned we enjoyed some time on campus, we also raided the Bookstore, went golfing, and explored some of the surrounding area. On Sunday, we found the stake center by following other BYU grads from our complex to the building.

On Monday morning, my family had a plane to catch. Before I dropped them off at the South Bend regional airport we went to Perkins for breakfast. Thankfully, we had a nice waitress who rushed our food out. We then followed Siri to the South Bend airport...except she thought we were an incoming plane that could land on the runway. We were totally lost. Time kept running out as we frantically tried to reroute Siri and find airport signs. Finally, we found the entrance and my family had a slight miracle in reminding the Frontier front desk person of his job so they could get on the plane. Thankfully they safely made it home. All in all it was a nice trip that felt like two weeks.