The story of my move from California to Texas is one of those stories that seems almost too bad to be true. Around Christmas last year, Katie's family, Katie, and I watched the classic movie Planes, Trains and Automobiles and, at the time, Steve Martin's consistently thwarted attempts to get home in time for Thanksgiving dinner seemed farfetched and outlandish. I enjoyed the movie, but didn't quite understand how so many bad things could happen to one person when they were just trying to get from one state to another. However, after the past week, I totally get it.
This story actually begins a few days prior to our actual move. July 27, 2010, to be exact. As you might already realize, July 27, was day one of the three-day California Bar Exam. Although there had been some fun moments leading up to this day, overall, the summer had been tense and stressful. When the Bar Exam arrived it was in a sense a relief because I finally got to stop studying and was able to just get the test over with. However, it was also an incredibly draining experience that left me wanting to vegetate on the couch staring aimlessly at a television for at least a week.
However, there was no time for relaxation or recovery. Instead, the next day I was awake at 7:30 am, working on packing up the few items Katie hadn't gotten to yet and finalizing everything for the movers to be able to easily load up the truck (or so we thought). Although I was tired, things appeared to be going okay. Katie had picked up our U-Haul truck, everything was beautifully packed (thank you Katie!) and the movers were set to arrive any minute. Little did I know what was in store for Katie and me over the next few hours...
It started with a minor crisis: shortly before the movers were supposed to arrive, Katie and I realized that I had left the keys to my car (which was parked where we had planned to park the moving truck) inside of Katie's car -- which was parked at the U-Haul store. Not a huge deal since our friend Tyler was nice enough to quickly give Katie a ride to pick her car up.
Next, we quickly realized that there was going to be a space issue with the truck. Our movers had advised us to get a 17-foot truck, but even before they arrived, we realized that there was no way in hell that all of our stuff was going to fit inside that small space. That this was the case was obvious to everyone involved -- except our movers. Instead our movers repeatedly insisted (over the course of three hours) that they could fit everything Katie and I owned into that 17-foot truck. Over and over we kept asking them to be realistic and to work with us to make a new plan, yet they insisted on proceeding with their misguided undertaking. And to make matters worse, our movers had already helped someone else move earlier that morning and were obviously exhausted and moving incredibly slowly.
Of course at this point, Katie and I were in a bind. We simply could not load the truck on our own (let's just say that Katie's furniture is not from IKEA) and it was too late to hire anyone else that evening. But after a stack of boxes crashed to the ground, we had had enough. Despite the fact that we had no idea what we were going to do without them, we quickly told the movers that they should stop working. However, in that moment our movers did the one good thing they did all day -- insisted on completing the job free of charge.
I won't bore you with all of the rest of the details about this episode, but suffice it to say, our initial "loading the truck woes" did not end there. We ultimately had to rent a trailer to be pulled behind the truck (yet still could not fit everything and had to leave behind an expensive mattress and entertainment center) and we were lucky to make it to our going away party by 9:00 pm!
All in all, this was not the way we had hoped to start our moving adventure! Little did we know there was still more to come...
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