T minus 3 days, and counting...
It is Monday, 8/14. Fresh from surviving a weekend of eating, shooting, and falling, I am ready to commence preparing for the big move. The Best MutherFucking Road Trip Ever (BMFRTE) is scheduled to begin at 10pm on Thursday night. I am excited. Soon I will be on my way back to the Promised Land- California.
Of course, given that I've been working 14 hours a day, and spending time with Keiko seeing the sights of NYC that I haven't seen in the 4 years I've lived here, and going out of town basically every weekend since Memorial Day, I haven't done much to actually prepare for a cross-country move. For instance, almost nothing is packed. My mom visited a few weeks ago, when _literally_ nothing was packed, and was kind enough to pack most of my dishes. Aside from that, the only things in boxes are the things that have lived in boxes in the back of my closet for the last 4 years, since I lived in Richmond, which was the last time I had space to put anything anywhere.
But, while I hadn't done much to physically prepare for the cross-country move, I had done a lot to mentally prepare. For instance, I had come up with one and a half brilliant plans. The brilliant half-plan (not too be confused with a half-brilliant plan) was my half of the overall plan for the BMFRTE. Ed had contributed the other half of the plan. We concocted the plan for the BMFRTE at Molly Pitcher's, on 2nd ave and 85th, over several margaritas (me) and Guinesses (Ed).
We started by assuming we had two weeks to get across the country. Then, figuring we had a whole country's worth of nature, museums, attractions, and people to see, it quickly became obvious that the BMFRTE should be organized around the one thing all those things have in common: baseball. After all, baseball is played (properly) in nature (outdoors on grass), is a most wonderful attraction, has its own museum, and, we could invite everyone we wanted to see along the way to a baseball game in their city.
And so, the BMFRTE was born. After several drinks, and poring over baseball schedules, and deciding to include more nature, and a wedding Ed had to go to, we came up with the following plan:
Thu 8/17: leave NYC
Fri 8/18: Acadia National Park
Sat 8/19: Wedding of Ed's friend. Gus catches up on 2 months of missed sleep.
Sun 8/20: Boston. Baseball game 1: Red Sox vs. Angels
Mon 8/21: Cooperstown. Baseball Hall of Fame
Tue 8/22: Chicago. BB game 2: White Sox vs.
Wed 8/23: StL. BB game 3: Cardinals vs. Marlins. Perfect, since Ed, being from Miami, is a Marlins fan
Thu 8/24: fly to Las Vegas. Rent a car and drive into southern Utah
Fri 8/25: Zion National Park
Sat 8/26: Bryce National Park
Sun 8/27: Salt Lake City. Drop off rental car and fly to Dallas. Rent another car. BB game 4: Rangers vs.
Mon 8/28: New Orleans.
Tue 8/29: Houston. BB Game 5: Astros vs. Cardinals.
Wed 8/30: drop off rental. Fly back to StL. Drive to Kansas City. BB Game 6: Royals vs.
Thu 9/1: drive to Denver. Rockies are out of town, so substitute football game 1: Broncos vs. Cardinals.
Fri 9/2: Drive to vegas. Stop at Arches National Park. In Vegas, win back cost of trip.
Sat 9/3: Phoenix. BB game 7: Diamondbacks vs.
Sun 9/4: San Diego. BB game 8: Padres vs. Dodgers.
Mon 9/5: LA. BB game 9: Angels vs. A's.
Tue 9/6: drive up PCH to Half Moon Bay. Drop Ed off at San Jose airport for red-eye back to NYC.
So that was the plan: 9 baseball games, 1 football game, 4 National parks, 1 museum, and seeing friends all along the way. That's a great road trip. In fact, it's the Best MutherFucking Road Trip Ever. Now, having carefully crafted a brilliant plan to get me/us across the country, I eventually realized I also needed a strategy to get everything I own across the country too. And that's where the second brilliant plan came in...
I looked at a lot of different options for getting my stuff to CA. The first one I looked at was renting a UHaul truck. I looked at this option even though I had had significant issues with UHaul in the past. For instance, when I was moving to Santa Monica in '96, I rented a UHaul from a place on Lincoln and Olympic, right at the entrance to the 10 freeway. It is literally right at the entrance. Since I was living in LA on $19,500 a year, with student loans and a competitive ballroom dance hobby that was expensive, I didn't have a lot of money and since it was a short, brief move (because of the aforementioned I also didn't have a lot of stuff), I decided to save some money and not get the insurance on the truck. I only needed it for a few hours.
Well, I rented the truck, got into it, turned it on, and turned out of the driveway and onto the entrance ramp. At this point, I have traveled a grand total of ten feet from the UHaul place, at a peak speed of 5 miles an hour, and haven't hit anything, including any and all curbs in the area. Which is why I was a little mystified by the passenger side mirror suddenly sliding right out of its frame and onto the pavement, where it shattered into microscopic-sized pieces.
Naturally, I went straight back into the UHaul place, and went back to the person who had just helped me, and explained what happened. Surely if turning out of their driveway at 5 mph caused the mirror to fall out, the thing had been defective from the start, and therefore I shouldn't be held accountable. A perfectly cogent argument, I thought. But neither this person nor her manager were sympathetic. Without the insurance, I was responsible. Period.
So I did my move, gave the truck back a couple hours later, and got charged an extra $350 to replace the mirror. It still rankles.
But, UHaul doesn't have a lot of competition for exactly what they do, so I investigated. The were willing to rent me a truck for only 11 days, and that was going to cost $1950 before any insurance or gas or anything. I needed the truck for 19 days. So, I tried another option- tractor trailer rental. You can rent space in a tractor trailer. That was a flat $1500 fee. Thing is, I live in Manhattan, and the company wouldn't send its truck there. I'd have to rent a van, load my stuff into it, drive it to Long Island, unload it from the van, load it into the tractor trailer, and then, fly to CA to meet it on the other side, since it only takes 3 days to go cross-country. Next I looked into just UPS ground shipping my stuff, but I have a couple thousand books, plus a lot of dishware, and by the time it was all added up it was definitely coming close to the $1500 mark, though it was still at that point the cheapest option.
At this point, I had a revelation. I don't have a car, and I'll need one the instant I set foot in CA, so why not get a car here, one big enough to tow a trailer. Then I could simply rent a trailer from UHaul, avoid some of the rentals that I would otherwise need on the BMFRTE, and at the end I would have a car to get around in once I was in CA. Brilliant!
So I went onto leasetrader.com and eventually found a guy with a GMC Envoy that looked in good condition and had plenty of miles left on the lease. Over a three week period, many documents were FedEx'd around in a triangle between Colorado, where GMC leasing is, Cazenovia, NY, where the guy was, and NYC, where I was. Keiko and I drove out to Cazenovia one weekend to evaluate the car, and the guy, since I wanted to make sure I was dealing with someone trustworthy. But that went well, and all was progressing according to plan. Tomorrow, Tuesday, I would go to the DMV to register the vehicle in my name, then in the evening Keiko and I would fly to Syracuse, where the guy would pick us up, take us to his house, and turn over the vehicle.
In final preparation for this event, I went online and made a reservation for a 5x8 UHaul trailer, which would comfortably fit behind a GMC Envoy. Although there were no trailers at the UHaul location on Manhattan, presumably because it would be a pain to drive it around on Manhattan streets, there was one scheduled for me in White Plains. This I was assured of when I called to verify that my reservation had gone through. And so, after yet another crazy workday, I went to bed confident that tomorrow, when I showed up at 830am at the 125th st DMV in Harlem, the final pieces of my brilliant plan would fall into place.
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