Thursday morning, moving day, dawned bright and sunny. We got up, quickly and efficiently packed our bags in the Uhaul, loaded the dog in the car and hit the road earlier than expected. There was little traffic, no construction and we only stopped once for gas and food. The weather forecast called for mostly sunny skies with a chance of rain late evening at our destination, but we arrived to sunny skies with a few gossamer clouds lazily drifting across the glittering city-scape. We were met at the front door by our Leasing Consultant, who let us into our new home, which was pristine, as though no one had ever lived there before, and wonderfully cool, despite the heat outside. Our first night in our new home consisted of a delightful picnic on the floor of our living room of Chinese take-out and a fresh bottle of wine, then we retired to sleep through the night on a light mattress in the bedroom.
WRONG.
That is not how the day went. At. All.
Thursday morning we got up early and started hauling the last few things out to the Uhaul. When I got home the night before the movers had packed everything but our suitcases, the mattress and cleaning supplies. I had spent the night before cleaning every inch of the house and it was pretty close to SPOTLESS (which totally appeals to my OCD - cleaning a house with nothing in it is so much easier, you don't have to move any furniture or knickknacks or toothbrushes, etc, so you can see every clean inch...love it love it love it. I love it so much, I now have fantasies of living in a home with absolutely nothing in it so I can clean and clean and clean...but that's a little crazy, so we won't talk about that anymore).
It was HOTTT in PA the day we were leaving, so when we rolled open the door to the semi-truck it was like getting into our very own mobile sauna...except that it smells like cardboard and metal and minor domestic violence. Loading the last few bags into the truck was easy, it just took a little longer than expected (like everything does) and then we had to embark on the complicated series of actions to get all trucks, trailers and cars ready to go.
Trip one: Matthew drives the Uhaul semi truck back to Uhaul on Allentown, I follow in his truck. At the Uhaul location they will hook up the trailer that will hold my car, while I'm waiting for them to find our trailer (yeah, because we didn't take it the day before when we picked up the semi - because it would be much harder to load the truck with the trailer attached - they thought they might have RENTED IT TO SOMEONE ELSE, delightful), Matthew took his truck to Starbucks to get me my drug, I mean, coffee.
Trip two: Matthew and I leave Uhaul, with coffee, and drive back to our house. The goals of this final visit are to pack up the dog and get my car, as well as do a final walk-through of our home. Matthew, still sick, realizes we should probably document the condition of our place because we have renters moving in the next week. I think this is a great idea because I can savor the cleanliness over and over. While he walks through taking video of each room, I put the dog's belongings in my car, then sit down to enjoy my breakfast and coffee, which I left sitting in the entryway...
A full grande mocha.
Sitting on the floor.
At the front door.
Where I promptly KICK IT OVER completely upside down and dump the entire contents of the aforementioned grande mocha on my FRESHLY CLEANED entryway and CARPET.
Where my BLIND DOG, who hears the possibility of spilled food, promptly walks through the middle of the spill and somehow manages to rub it on the wall.
The freshly painted wall.
Me: SON OF A BITCH!!!
Matt: (from the bedroom upstairs) What? What happened?
Me: NOTHING! Bandit, no no no no!
Matt: Did you knock over your coffee? (like he knows me or something)
Me: BANDIT NO NO NO! (blind, epileptic dog with notoriously delicate gastrointestinal system drinking cafe mocha before a 9 hour car ride...excellent)
Towels = all packed
Paper towels = packed
Sponges = packed
Two napkins from Starbucks = inadequate
I had nothing left but the clothes on my back.
So I sat on it.
Matt: (coming down the stairs) What are you doing?
Me: (scooting around on the floor on my rear, trying to utilize dry parts of my shorts while simultaneously fighting off the dog who is now trying to lick the floor, walls and my ass)
Matt: Honey!?
Me: nothing, it's fine, I got it.
Matt: oh my god.
Coffee fricking everywhere. EVERYWHERE. All over the floor and seeping under that little strip of metal they nail between the carpet and hard floor...and now all over me. It looked like I'd had explosive diarrhea. And my clothes were all packed in boxes, except the suitcase I'd packed with a couple day's worth of clothes.
Which was in the back of the Uhaul semi truck.
Which was sitting in the parking lot of the Uhaul store on Allentown Blvd with a trailer hooked to the back.
And the worst part? I had only had one or two sips of that coffee! Not anywhere near enough to survive this day.
My husband has a cool head in a crisis (probably a good thing, you really wouldn't want your surgeon screaming and running around in a panic...or mopping liquids off the floor with his pants, for that matter, but whatever). He found a sponge on the top of the trash, washed it off and wiped down everything as best he could. Then he gave me his coffee. I would marry him again in a second.
Trip 3: Back to Uhaul with both cars, dog and a mocha-scented pair of shorts. Delightful.
So our plan to get on the road by 9am was not successful and at 11:00am we hit the turnpike. Bandit and I are leading the caravan in Matthew's truck (I plan to do most of the driving, after all, Bandit is blind), he is following in the semi truck pulling my car.
For the first several hours, we were doing okay...even though we were going slow enough to be passed by the real semi trucks. We stopped for gas just before Pittsburgh and got a bite to eat. Then we hit Pittsburgh. And construction. Narrow two-lane stretches with concrete barriers inches from the side of the semi left no room for error, but he made it through (white-knuckled all the way).
Ohio was rolling by easily until we were just outside of Toledo. That's when the thunderstorms hit. And the rain. And the tornado warnings.
SERIOUSLY? Could we just get to Michigan? It was raining so hard I would have had better luck blowing on the windshield because the wipers were completely ineffectual. Traffic was going 35 miles and hour. Fan-fricking-tastic.
This entire day was becoming a test of the actual strength of my deodorant. Watching the Uhaul semi-truck weave through construction, getting caught in a monsoon...what next? Oh, I'll tell you 'what next'...
A damn TORNADO.
Some of you may know how I feel about natural disasters (tornadoes, earthquakes, hurricanes) = Bad. I do not feel good about these at all. We do not have these things in Oregon. None. The worst we get is flooding, but not even flash flooding (typically), there's usually plenty of warning.
The Emergency Broadcast System keeps popping up on the radio to tell us there are severe thunderstorms and tornado warnings, then a tornado sighting, in all these counties, etc. Of course, I do not know where these counties are because I DON'T KNOW OHIO GEOGRAPHY. Well that's just awesome. Now I'm going to get swept off to Oz in a pair of coffee crusted shorts. Not okay.
After a 35 mile an hour crawl we finally reached our exit and the tollbooth operator says: Now you know, there's a tornado in this area. Goody. At this point, I just didn't even care. I couldn't care. I just wanted to get to our new home because, oh guess what? I was starting to get sweaty and chills...a fever. The Plague was creeping in.
At 9pm two sick adults (one who smelled of coffee and looked like she'd pooped her pants BIG TIME), one blind dog, a Uhaul semi-truck pulling a trailer and a small white pickup truck pulled into The Heights in Madison Heights, MI. It was about 88 degrees and 90% humidity.
When our leasing consultant met us at the office we must have looked like a bad mistake, but she took us to our apartment anyway. It looked great, very clean, nice space, but on the third floor and a wee bit toasty since the air conditioning was turned off. We could have cared less at that point, we just hauled the mattress up the three flights of stairs (SOOO happy with each step that we had movers coming the next day to unload everything else), got the dog fed, pottied and put to bed, and went off in search of food.
By this time (10pm-ish), Matthew was actually feeling a bit better and, for the first time I can remember, said he couldn't eat junk food for another meal. I just wanted to put some french fries and a milkshake in my mouth and lay down for about, oh, 17 hours of sleep. Given that we had just left an area where restaurants close by 10pm, I was not feeling hopeful about our options, but we went into downtown Royal Oak, MI.
It was at this moment, through a haze of fever and irritation, that I was able to recognize one thing very clearly: I am going to love this place. It was 10:30pm and there were restaurants open everywhere...and people sitting at the outdoor tables drinking beer and talking about interesting things...and smiling at strangers (no longer wearing poopy/coffee pants because I'd found my suitcase. I suspect they would have been less smiley if I looked like I had mismanaged incontinence issues)...and the waiter was so friendly.
And we had sushi.
And life was (feverish, but) good.
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