Moving is Stressful Enough, but This is Ridiculous

My wife and I spent a bad year living in Sarasota Florida. We had moved there suddenly under less than ideal conditions, after 13 years in the Philadelphia suburbs, and 10 years in NYC prior to that. We had been to Sarasota often - in fact we were married there in 1974 - but living there did not work for us for a number of reasons.

So we prepared our escape as soon as possible after a year of suffering on many levels.

PREPARATION

I rented a U-Haul trailer on Friday night. My nephew and a couple of friends who we knew from NYC days, and who also happened to have moved to Sarasota for a short time while we were there, helped us methodically pack it. This was after spending many weeks organizing and labeling dusty boxes. After the U-Haul was packed, tired and sweaty, we scrubbed every nook and cranny of the apartment until 3 or 4 A.M., in hopes of getting our security deposit back. (Insert your own joke here.)

By the time we had everything packed and wedged into the trailer, it was hanging far too low in the front, pulling the back of car down with it to about 3 or 4 inches from street level. This is pretty much the way we hit the road early Saturday morning August 15th after just an hour or two of uncomfortable sleep on hard floors. We were determined to drive straight out of Florida and into Georgia without stopping if we could. Destination: Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University, Sally's alma mater, and an oasis in the state of Indiana. We had no friends there, no place to live, no jobs, and no money to speak of. It was a leap of faith. All our belongings were in the trailer, and our most precious belongings, our 2 cats, our computer and immediate comfort items were packed in the back of our 1988 Chevy Caprice.

HITTING THE ROAD

As we backed out of the driveway, the low-riding heavy trailer bumped the pavement with sparks. Not a good omen, but at least we were off to a nerve-wracking departure. The cats, Shelly and Peeps, were in a cage on the back seat, covered with a blanket.

After 8 hours of continuous driving North, we finally made it out of the sandbar that is Florida, into the foothills of the continental U.S. and up into the state of Georgia. It was about 4PM - the hottest part of a blazing sunny day.

As soon as we were able, we made a gas stop/comfort break at a giant interstate gas station/super-sized convenient store. One of us stayed in the car with the cats and with the A/C running while the other went inside, took care of personal business, and purchased whatever meager sustenance we could find at such a place (peanuts, soda...that sort of thing).

From there we got right onto Georgia's I-75, heading ever northward. We starting thinking "OK...we can do this...we're good," and a moment later heard a muffled "BooM" as a rear tire blew out. I managed to pull our speeding load off the highway onto the slender shoulder of the road. We had to leave the car running so that A/C would stay on to keep the cats comfortable. The shoulder was inches from the highway, and the cars and 18-wheelers kept whizzing by, which was no comfort. Temperature: 98 degrees.

We happened to have an 8 x 10 inch fluorescent orange cardboard sign in the car. It simply had the bold words "SEND HELP" printed on it. We were both doing our very best to keep calm. Sally held up the sign up to the oncoming traffic that was whizzing by. Cell phones were not so common in 1998, but we think someone with a mobile car phone must have called a tow truck for us. After way too much time in the heat and traffic, a rickety old tow truck appeared from the exit behind us with its dingy yellow strobe blinking. I explained to the local mechanic on-scene that I had already jacked the car up as much as I could, but my jack was jammed inside the wheel somehow due to the extra weight we were pulling (which is also what caused the blowout). A few minutes later, the mechanic's jack was also jammed in there. All the while, our car's motor was idling so that the cats in the backseat would still have air conditioning in the 98-degree heat, and the rear passenger end was half-jacked up in the air. The mechanic eventually extricated both jacks. (During this maneuver I was worried that the weight of our load would come crashing down on him and tear his arm off.) We popped open our shoulder-high trunk, removed our spare tire, and that's when we found out that it had no air in it. Useless.

The mechanic drove back to his service station to bring us a brand new tire. "We'll just wait here," we thought to ourselves as he drove off. We stayed with the car and the cats and the 18-wheelers roaring past us in the scorching sun. After an hour or so the mechanic returned and installed our new tire, and we followed him back to his gas station to pay for the new tire with a credit card we happened to have. We continued on our way, somewhat relieved, but with jangled nerves and now 3 hours behind schedule. It must have 6:30 or 7PM at least by then.

GOOD TO GO

The next part of the trip was a beautiful stretch of Route 82 through Georgia. Very comforting to see, and we were sure that the worst of our journey was behind us. The land was beautiful, and since we had all of our possessions in tow, it occurred to us that in our homeless state we could conceivably just pull off the road at any point and decide to "just live here." The trailer and overloaded U-Haul situation continued to make us nervous, but we pressed on nonetheless, traveling very slowly, especially after the blowout incident, knowing that we were pulling too much weight.

Our first destination was Auburn, Alabama, where Sally's half-sister Eve lived. The plan was to connect with her, and then follow her to Birmingham, where we would get a night's rest at Sally's half-brother's house (Marc). Being 3 hours behind schedule, dusk was rapidly approaching as we approached Auburn and found Eve. We questioned the sanity of continuing into the night, but did. We hadn't planned on driving in darkness. It was around 8PM, and we had traveled about 500 miles.

PHASE II- THE DARK PASSAGE

Night was falling as we pulled out of Auburn and began following Eve on the unknown roads to Birmingham. We found ourselves traveling up and down hilly country roads in the pitch black night, exhausted, hungry, and somewhat terrified of another mechanical malfunction. We were determined to make the last 100 miles to Birmingham.

Going up every incline was taxing our car to the max. We began smelling a slight burning smell with each long hill we climbed. As the hills became longer and longer, each upward incline was more excruciating to endure. These were some really long hills, too, and we were pretty sure that at some point something would either catch fire, explode, come unhitched, or fail in some other way that we couldn't imagine. Dark now. Miles ahead of us, we noticed lots of vivid lightning in the night sky, and I recall thinking "Oh good. By the time we get to where those storms are now, they will have moved eastward." No such luck. The lightning became more spectacular and frequent. As we plundered northward, rain showers started and grew more intense.

Soon we were in the most treacherous and frightening driving weather imaginable...torrential rain, thunder, and vivid lightning strikes on unfamiliar roads in the dark back hills of Alabama. It was a challenge not to lose sight of Eve's car's taillight, which we did several times, but were somehow able to find her again because she would pull over to wait for us.

By this time, going downhill was as frightening as going uphill, because the weight of the trailer bore down on us, making control difficult on the wet asphalt. It also strained the engine more and more with each uphill climb. More burning smells, too, plus, we were also concerned for the cats in the backseat. Were they sensing our terror in their covered cage? They had no kitty-litter facilities all this time, and had been just quiet for all these hours. We were unbelievably frightened, and towards the end we were both praying out loud, holding hands when possible, and wishing we could just get to where we were going. This was the darkest part of this dark passage. The storm had stopped, and we were now following Eve through a hellish fluorescent asphalt steamy area somewhere between the Birmingham metroplex and the nearby suburbs. We arrived at Marc's house after 4 hours had passed (usually a 1 hour trip) at 12:10 AM, way behind our "schedule." I had been driving for 16 hours straight, and had managed to contain myself during the trip (except for the last hour or so), and Sally had become total nervous wreck. "I guess I picked the wrong week to stop smoking."

PHASE III- RECONFIGURING

After decompressing as best we could, we decided that we could not proceed with our current trailer hook-up. The next day (Sunday, August 16th), I went to the local U-Haul place in Birmingham, and exchanged our trailer for a 14 foot U-Haul truck. This meant unloading the trailer quickly, so I could make the exchange by 5PM, come back and re-pack everything into the truck (no small feat, this). Eve and Sally helped as best they could.

Because of our traumatic journey, and the physical effort of re-packing, we decided to take a day to compose ourselves and get some rest, so we stayed in Birmingham for another night. On Monday morning, August 17^th, we left Birmingham caravan-style: Sally and the cats in the car, followed by me in a nice new 14-foot U-Haul truck. We continued North - next scheduled stop: New Albany, Indiana, Sally's home town.

HOSPITALITY?

We arrived in New Albany around 6:30 PM on the 17th, only to find nobody home in the house at which we were to stay, the home of ...I'll call her "D," one of Sally's childhood friends. D knew we were coming, and the approximate hour of our arrival, but she was not home. We looked for a note, but there was no note. We waited outside on the curb alongside the cats in their box. The four of us were confused, hot, dry, tired, thirsty and uncomfortable. We watched traffic go by on New Albany's Main Street, keeping an eye out for D. After about 50 minutes, she finally appeared, happy and gleeful, with no acknowledgement of her absence. "Oh! We were out in the country feeding my llamas!" she exclaimed, "Come on in!"

Her huge old brick house reeked of cat piss as she showed us in. We were really parched, and were waiting for a "can I get you something to drink?" which never came. We eventually asked D if we could have some water please. We could and did. We knew we were to be staying on the third floor, so we brought the heavy cat cage up with us to the second floor. D opened a tiny door to the third floor, revealing about 25 very very steep wooden "attic steps," which were also very hot from lack of ventilation. The stairs were particularly arduous for me, since I had pneumonia while in Sarasota, and was left with an asthma-like breathing difficulty. The room at the top of the stairs had a weak air conditioner, but the trips up and down those stairs were killers! Also, as we found out too late, the mattress on the bed had no support in the middle, and would buckle, gravity sending us both towards the middle of the bed. Somewhat comical in retrospect I suppose, but not at the time.

After a few hours of tossing and turning that hot night, despite our exhaustion, we could not sleep in that bed. We ended up switching to the floor around 4 AM.

When we awoke shortly after dawn on Tuesday the 18th, our first thoughts were to extricate ourselves from the situation and find something to eat and a new place to stay. We had abandoned our original plans to store our things and take a trip to find an apartment in Bloomington. At this point we needed food, water, a place to rest, and the opportunity to gather our wits and come up with a "plan B." On leaving D's house in the morning, D was very upset and apparently quite angry with us for no apparent reason. We told her how thankful we were for her accommodations, but that we that we really needed to get to where we were going. D, in tears at the front door as we left: "Just go." We didn't have time to ponder what her point of view was, and were very glad to be "free" again. It was Wednesday the 18^th.

We found various pathetic foodstuffs to eat sometime during that day - I forget what it was, but it was far from a nutritious or even satisfying meal. Let's say bread and water.

Sally's wonderful Aunt Joyce provided us with basic comforts we needed, and a telephone! We had not wanted to bother her on our original blowing into town, because we didn't know how late it might be, and Joyce had a little dog, and we didn't see how the logistics would work with our two cats.

SO NEAR, AND YET...

We went to Joyce's and discovered that we could keep the cats on Joyce's enclosed patio overnight while we slept in her two guest beds. We slept there on Wednesday night, the 19^th. The next day, Thursday, the 20^th, we made a slew of phone calls to places in Bloomington to find pet-friendly hotels, apartments to investigate, and how and where we could return our fifty dollar-a-day rented U-Haul truck as soon as possible once we had it unloaded.

Thursday the 20th we left New Albany and arrived in Bloomington after a 2-hour trip. We checked into the Days Inn. The cats were fine, and seemed to enjoy the cool non-jostling Days Inn room, and not hurling through space covered with a dark blanket. In fact they appeared to be having some fun and bouncing off the walls.

Since we still had our U-Haul truck ($50 a day), we were in a frenzy to find an apartment the next day. There was a Denny's next to the Day's Inn, and our first order of business after checking in was to actually sit a table and be served actual food at a table. It was our first actual meal since the previous Saturday. We went back to our room, armed with newspapers and phone books, and made some local calls to find apartments to visit, and to locate some mover/hauler-type guys to be at the ready to help us unload the truck.

After making a few sparse connections, we slept well that night, and awoke on Friday the 21st, determined to take care of all business and return the truck by the end of that day.

FINDING A HOME

By the end of that day, we had seen 3 or 4 apartments and other apartment locations that we didn't bother pursuing. We finally found the Bart Villa complex, where pets were welcome. We went back to the Days Inn to make final arrangements finding a helper to unload our truck, following up on phone messages we had left the previous evening. One guy said he and his partner could do it for $140, another said $75. Finally some guy knocked on our Days Inn door and said he'd do it for $40, and that his girlfriend would help. We said "Sure! Let's go!"

The guy helped us unload the truck pronto. His girlfriend was no help at all - she was nauseous and pregnant and spent the whole time in his truck. We got everything into our apartment by about 4PM, and the guy escorted us back to the U-Haul return location by 5PM!

We checked out of the Days Inn and brought the cats over to the apartment, and we were finally moved in. The "Bart Villa" complex consisted of four buildings surrounding an open courtyard. There were trees, some picnic tables and sunny grassy areas. There were lots of students with dogs and cats around. We figured this would be a good place to stay for a year while we got situated, never imagining that we would spend 8 years there.

We spent our first night there, and when we woke up it was Sally's birthday, August 22^nd.

This story definitely continues, but it could also end here.