The big move - part 1

The past few weeks have been such an exhausting whirlwind that it's hard remember everything that happened.

James and I had our last day of work on Friday, April 17, and our start date in Massachusetts was April 27, giving us just one week (and two weekends) to pack up and move across the country. And even though we'd been packing up what we could for a while, it was still a hectic and remarkably time-consuming process to move out. We barely finished, actually.

We scheduled the moving truck for Monday April 20th, and our flight home was scheduled for Wednesday. But the flight was leaving out of Bakersfield, not LA - we had to drive up to his parents' house on Tuesday in order to make the Wednesday flight. We were flying out of Bakersfield so that we could leave our car at his parents' house until June 21, when we'd fly back after the wedding and start our cross-country roadtrip honeymoon.

Because we were renting space on a semi and not a normal-sized truck, we couldn't have the trucking company bring the truck to us - we'd have no place to put something that big anywhere near our apartment. So we rented a Uhaul and planned to drive our stuff over to the trucking company's hub in Compton (which, in case you didn't know, is a notoriously sketchy part of the greater Los Angeles area).

By Monday afternoon, we were still busily packing away by the time 5pm rolled around, and we still hadn't loaded anything on the big truck - just the Uhaul. And this was after we were up late packing the night before and we started packing at 5:30am that morning. So we decided that since we thought we were over half done, we'd take a load over to Compton, pack the truck loosely, then finish with the other load the next day. And that's exactly what we did, except for the fact that we were nowhere near as done as we thought we were. Everything was taking about twice as long as we expected it to. It was exhausting and seemingly endless work - oh, and by the way, we had the joy of experiencing the first heat wave of the summer those few days. And we were working all by ourselves, since we couldn't ask anyone to take off work to help us - and the trucking company wasn't open on weekends. That meant a lot of heavy lifting (the guns I have now! My word!) but luckily we bought something called the ForeArm Forklift, which made all the heavy lifting possible.

Even with all of our tireless work, we finished up packing the semi around 10pm - Tuesday, when we'd originally thought we'd finish up Monday night and drive to Porterville Tuesday after lunch. It was a surreal feeling to be standing in the semi at 10pm, eating a Snickers bar because we hadn't had time to eat and were about to fall over, and realizing that it would be 3 or 4 am by the time we'd reach Porterville. By the time we returned the Uhaul, went back to El Segundo to drop off some moving equipment that we'd borrowed from my brother and said our goodbyes to him, it was after 11pm when we started out for Porterville, and after 3am when we rolled into their driveway. I'd been worried that our flight out of Bakersfield the next day was at some horrific hour like 8 am, when Bakersfield was an hour away from Porterville and we'd have to be at the airport two hours early, so we'd hardly be able to get any rest before we'd have to be up again. Luckily, though, the flight was in the early afternoon, so we could get some sleep!

To be continued... ;)