Last Tuesday night, I fell asleep playing 3D tetris in my mind. It wasn’t a dream, though I wished it was. Instead I was mentally orienting all of our furniture to see how it could fit in our 17ft UHaul for our move back to Colorado.
It wasn’t that we were unprepared. The previous week my parents flew out to help us pack and we spent an intense week getting ready. We sold our second car, we packed all the closets, the drawers, the random things hanging out on our desks (where do we get all of that stuff?). We purged things that we really didn’t need — like my original laptop from 1998. I did try to boot it but it gave out one last long beep and then died. So the house was ready, but the question remained: would it all fit.
On Wednesday evening, we had over 19 people show up from Esperanza Viva, the Spanish-speaking church that we had been attending. They managed to get all of our belongings out of our apartment, but packing the truck was taking more time. Furniture and boxes lay strewn about the truck like a pack of dogs all clamoring to on board. But we resisted the temptation to just throw them in there and another engineer and I worked hard to try to fill ever cubic inch of space. There were not a few doubters that it would all fit, but just like leftovers going into Tupperware, it’s amazing how much can fit in a small space.
It turned out there was even more stuff that was still left in the house to pack, but after a little repacking as well as shedding some laundry baskets and that old Ficus that decorated our porch, we managed to get everything in the truck and were ready to go — almost.
My wife followed me over to get the tow dolly for our car and on the way, I took a turn just a little to tight for our truck and caught one of the rear tires on the median. There was a large sound but it wasn’t the first time I had caught the median before. Ann though, who was following behind, watched the tire explode with a huge white puff and envisioned all of our belongings going with it. Needless to say, this did not inspire confidence for driving not only the truck but also towing a car behind.
Fortunately, the truck made it to the UHaul but indeed we had a blow out. One of the employees stuck their finger in the tire just to show how bad it was. After waiting an hour for the tire repair man, we launched our 1200 mile journey right at rush hour traffic.
Now even though Tetris may have helped me pack the truck, Mario Cart proved less useful with a 27ft rig. It took 2 more days, but we have finally arrived back in Colorado. The furniture and boxes are in their kennel (storage) for now and the truck made it back to UHaul in one piece.
Thank you so much to all of you who helped us with our move. We couldn’t have done it without you. We will miss all of our friends and family in California and look forward to getting to hang out again with our friends and family here in Colorado.
If you want to see some pictures from the trip, you can check out my twitter feed (@brinkofchaos) located on the front page of this blog.
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