One More Thing...: Moving Day!

As you probably know, every moving day (also know as "the big day" or "this is it" and perhaps a few others) is preceded by a good deal of work in preparation. In our case it was about 60 boxes of work!

Interestingly enough when one is packing up a small apartment a major issue becomes finding a place for packed boxes. It doesn't seem like this should be an issue - everything fits in there already all I have to do is put it into boxes, right? I guess not - so we got creative and made ever higher stacks of boxes and still managed to get space to walk around. This of course makes you wonder - will a 16 foot truck hold all this stuff that is more than filling our apartment?

It started slowly but since Dad, Mom and Mark were there to help us it was a lot easier. And since this all started happening at about 8:30 in the morning I'm sure our neighbors were happy to see us go if they weren't already!

Eventually, things were looking pretty cleared out in good old #309...

And things were looking quite full in the truck!

But it turns out that you can get all of our stuff in one truck. Now for the fun part - driving!

Thankfully, the traffic wasn't bad and after starting at about 8:30am we were ready for lunch and then hit the road at 1pm. Now, since there are strict stipulations regarding who may or may not drive the rental truck it of course came down to me to be the only driver and I had to follow the rules...

Rule #1: No drive-thru with the truck. Okay, not an issue.

Rule #2: Be sure to stop at all weigh stations or you may be ticketed. Sure, no prob...wait, what?! Quick, how may weigh stations are there? Where are they? What do you really do there? Okay, there's one in Valencia - but how does it work? Suddenly, the idea of getting weighed, never an issue to me before, was one of concern. Does this 6-ton truck make my butt look big?

Before I could even think through how I would navigate the station I accidentally drove right past it and lumbered off into the mountains. I had all my stuff loaded up and I was running from the law!

I would also like to point out that the highways are in much better shape North of the grapevine. I can safely say this because since moving trucks are actually constructed using trampolines every crack in the road creates a bounce which has about 3 to 4 aftershocks that keep you rocking for some time. I thought if I had the right rhythm in LA I was going just just bounce right over another car (or perhaps a weight station)!

Overall, the trip went well and I only cut off one car - not bad I'd say for driving an 800 cubic foot box down the road for about 4 hours. But we survived and I even managed to back the thing into our driveway without damaging/scaring/killing anything!

We had even more help at our new house and quickly got into unloading mode. Jen got into it and armed with her tool belt I thought I was going to see Tim 'the tool man' Taylor any minute.