The Big Move, Part 2

Only a month late. Oh well.

5/19/2007 - Loading and Unloading

After averting a near disaster by picking up our U-Haul truck on Friday, all that remained was the physical loading of said truck, driving to Minneapolis, and unloading the truck. Now I know that Meaghan and I must be two of the strongest people in the world, but we have a lot of stuff. More stuff than we could probably shuttle in and out of a house twice in one day. So in order to manage the job, we enlisted the help of 12 extremely nice friends. Thanks Brett, Jeff, Mike, Kim, Tony, Urrv, Andy, Brett, Matt, Laurel, Chris, and Alaina. We really couldn't have done it without you. (Thanks, too, to Carol and Isaac for moral support and mad sidewalk chalk skillz.)

The help was so incredible that we managed to tightly pack the entire 24' truck with all of our earthly belongings in a mere hour and a half. Chris and Urrv's pack job was amazing, especially given how few things we had available to provide padding. After a quick lunch at Subway, the caravan hit the highway.

This possibly took longer than either the packing or the unpacking phase. I don't know if you've ever driven a fully laden U-Haul before, but man does it chug up hills. There's not exactly any Pike's Peak in between Rochester and Minneapolis, but we were topping out at 45 MPH trying to get up some of the larger rises. As a result, the first part of the caravan got to our new place a good half hour before the truck did. To kill time, the early arrivers apparently had some adventure trying to help a random woman turn off her two car alarms... or something like that. I wouldn't know, I was driving the truck. (Incidentally, not a day has gone by without a car alarm going off for minutes at a time at some point.)

Once we finally got there, it only took another 90 mins to unload everything into the house. Well... almost everything. Our new house was built in 1907, so it's safe the say that the width and angles of various doors and halls aren't up to modern building standards. Miraculously, with a little cajoling everything fit with the exception of our queen-size box spring. We figured that might happen, so it wasn't a big deal. It was only another week of sleeping on sleeper sofas before we were able to get our half-queen springs from Slumberland.

After a day's hard work, we all went over to Pizza Luce on Lyndale. (Thanks for the idea, Kim.) They have an interesting array of pizzas to choose from, all of them good. We'd been to the one in St. Paul before, but it's good to know one is so close by if we're ever in the mood.