Moving Right Along

Our new townhouse!

The worst thing about being a Move-a-lot?  The actual moving.  Sure, the packing sucks, the cleaning sucks, and trying to renovate a 111-year old house at the last minute REALLY sucks.  But I also hate the driving, the physical act of moving me, a baby, two cats, a dog, and, oh yeah, a husband from one state through many more states to another state.  This trip didn’t fail to provide endless amounts of what is now entertainment, but at the time was not-so-funny.

The plan: leave Boston Wednesday morning, stay overnight in Philly, get to new townhouse nice and fresh early Thursday afternoon.

The reality: We left late Saturday afternoon, around 4, after throwing in a whirlwind of last minute DIY projects involving our house.  No worries, we’ll get to the other side of New York (a 4-hour trip) and just stop at a Motel 6 (pet-friendly!) for the night and make a longer journey the next day.  Easy breezy.

Except our 4-hour trip to New York found us, 7 hours later, driving through what I imagine is Spanish Harlem in a two car + UHaul caravan, completely lost.  I managed to stay in good spirits, however, as I decided it was an excellent opportunity to turn myself into an aggressive driver as I cut off taxis and yelled profanities along with the best of them.  Completely exhausted, we just wanted to get to our stopping point, so once we were out of there, we called the Motel 6 to find that they were all booked (holiday weekend) and that the only one available was even further away.  What can ya do?  We plodded on.

Then, we were driving along in our slow little train and an SUV gets between my husband and U-Haul and myself, apparently drafting off of my husband.  Sadly, I had used up my cell phone battery completely, so I had no way of communicating with Mr. Move-a-Lot.  I noticed that I was decreasing my speed, and figured that he was slowing down so this SUV would get tired of drafting and just go around.  Pretty soon we were going 40 in a 55 and SUV was happy to oblige our slower speed.  I couldn’t really see Mr. Move-a-Lot, but the SUV put on his blinker to exit, and just when I was saying “Thank Goodness”, I noticed Mr. Move-a-Lot was exiting as well.  In fact, the SUV followed my husband off the exit, turn right with him, and followed him onto a dark off-road next to a closed lumber factory of some sort.  Mr. M pulled into the factory and this SUV pulled off the road.  The driver got out and opened what appeared to be his trunk, hood, and doors and just stood next to his car staring at my husband and I (I pulled up behind Mr. M.).  Hubby gets out of his car and comes to my window with a map.  I immediately say “Who the F is this guy?” and Mr. M says he doesn’t know and tries to show me something on a map.  Well, I wasn’t so much in the mood to get murdered or held up, so I told him to put the stupid map away, get in his car and high tail it out of there, which he did.  For the next 20 minutes, I came up with various scenarios as to what was going on.  He was probably a sex trafficker and thought Jon had child prostitutes in his U-Haul and was waiting for a hand off.  I probably should have gotten his license plate and called him in and then I would be a big freakin’ hero.  But, I was tired, hungry, and had a baby and a zoo in my car, so we just drove on.  A bit disarming, though.

So, at 2:30 we rolled into the junkiest Motel 6 you’ve ever seen, but, hey, they take pets and we have them, so who cares?  Three trips into the dirty hotel room later, we are ready to completely pass out when Baby Move-a-Lot announces he’s quite well-rested and in need of food and entertainment.  No problem, a bottle of formula will zonk him out.  Oh wait, there’s no more formula in the diaper bag?  It’s packed somewhere in our U-Haul you say?  There’s no shutting this kid up without formula?  FANTASTIC.  At 4:30 in the morning, as Mr. M and I have passed the 22 hour mark for being awake, Baby M decides he’s ready to snooze.  How kind of the young prince.  We completely pass out amidst a set of freaked out dog and cats.

Thankfully the next day was uneventful.  It took some work to pull the cats out from under the Motel 6 bed (and who wants to go around digging under a Motel 6 bed?).  But, a few short hours later we pulled into the parking lot of our townhouse in Alexandria.  The smell of new carpet greeting us, not to mention the smell of 90 degree humid weather, as we happily carried in our things, all laid down on the floor, and took a nap.

What’s YOUR funnest (worst) moving experience?