Michelle Smiles

Teaching my children to question authority, except mine.

How do you spell move? F-I-A-S-C-O

June26

Holy Crap! I just want to forget the past 3 days ever happened. Moving 600 miles away? I don’t recommend it. At all.

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First, I need to give kudos to the one piece of the move that went well. We rented a big U-Haul truck (that isn’t the part that went well) and hired movers through emove to pack the truck in Pittsburgh and unpack it in Nashville. They were fabulous and I highly recommend trying them if you have to move and you don’t have a family full of big burly men chomping at the bit to heave your couch around. They were very respectful of our furniture and were very fast (unlike traditional movers who tend to move at the speed of smell in my experience). It was also very affordable – 4 guys for 4 hours on a Sunday morning for $400. (I got quotes from moving companies…they wanted $5K for the whole move and didn’t want to take a check post-dated for 2009. Picky, picky, picky.)

Everything else went horribly wrong. First, the U-Haul people were supposed to call and tell us when and where to pick up the truck on Saturday. They never called despite my pestering them. We finally tracked down our truck at 5:30 Saturday evening. It was at a store 45 minutes from our house that had already closed and wasn’t open on Sundays. Nice. Thankfully the man who owns the store agreed to come in on Sunday morning at 7am so we could get the truck. We got lost trying to find the truck on Sunday and arrived late. Again, the nice man stayed and waited for us. He even made coffee for us. I drove like a maniac to get home because the movers were due at the house at 8am. I was late again. They were hanging out on our porch waiting for us. They packed up the truck and left. Steve and I said our good-byes.

Sabrina and I were just getting on the highway when my phone rang. Steve was calling to say he couldn’t get the truck out of the driveway so I turned around and went home. Our driveway slopes down and the road slopes up – there wasn’t enough clearance to back the truck on to the road – the hitch kept digging into the asphalt. We called my father in law for assistance. They came up with an idea but when they tried to implement it, the truck got stuck. Yes, my friends, we got a U-Haul stuck 1/2 in our driveway and 1/2 in the road. On a blind curve. All of the neighborhood men came out to consult and scratch their chins. No one could figure out how to get the truck unstuck. It wasn’t budging. So we called 1-800-Big-Ass-Tow-Truck to get it unstuck. We left 4 hours later than we planned. Because we left so late, we had to stop 1/2 way and spend the night – we were too tired to drive until 2am. Steve got stuck behind an accident on a bridge for 2 hours about 4 miles from the hotel.

The movers called at 8am wanting to know if they could arrive at 9am to unpack the truck (my only complaint was that the movers on the Nashville end had never confirmed a time so we had no idea when they wanted to come). We were in Louisville, KY so we told them we wouldn’t hit town until 1pm. The U-Haul is not a fast moving vehicle so I called them later to make it 1:45. I arrived at 1:45, Steve didn’t make it until 2:15 but the movers hung out and waited. It hasn’t rained in Nashville in 3 weeks. As soon as Steve drove up, torrential downpour. So we moved in the rain. Good times.

But we are all in the same time zone, living under the same roof, safe and sound. So all is well that ends well.

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