Test Run

Still in Ohio.

We loaded the trailer, truck and my car fully today. I still have tons of room in my car. I wanted to leave enough space for the two cats to roam around and stretch their legs if they wanted to, crying and peeing on stuff no doubt. Actually, there is room in Donnie’s truck bed and trailer as well, but as stated yesterday, it’s the weight that has us worried. We then topped the truck with an 11 foot aluminum boat (dubbed Hal Fiskur, or “dried fish” in Icelandic). The truck’s rear was now nearly sitting on the pavement, so we decided to take a test drive up the street and down a few miles of interstate, to see if this crazy scheme of traveling close to 3000 miles was even a possibility. We are both equipped with CB radios, and so we set them to ch. 21 (close to trucker ch.19) and rolled out.

First thing that happened was my CB stopped working. I’m following close behind this bouncing, white marshmallow of a trailer and suddenly Donnie turns on his flashers (he has it rigged so the trailer lights flash as well - they didn’t work right away today, until he spritzed the connectors with WD40.) He gets out and fiddles with his antenna, then tries to figure out if it was the electrical system somehow interfering. Well, finally, just before we lost all hope, I realized my antenna was just unplugged. I corrected this and everything was hunky dory.

Actually it was. Except for bottoming out on our driveway, we did fine. In fact, as we turned down I90 (the route we will take tomorrow morn), Donnie calls to me over the CB “Forget the cats, let’s just keep going!”

We had to do a lot of cleaning - luckily Donnie worked for 6 hours on the oven last night, so that freed up a lot of his time today... to work on the fridge. I just about passed out from bleach fumes in the bathroom.

Also, I repacked some of my boxes of paper and got rid of a lot of crap I’ve been carting around for no good reason. It was hard at first - we had already been through all of this - deciding what to pack, what to give away, what to donate. But now I had to look at the things I had decided to take along, and figure out what I could live without. And then, not only did I have to get rid of it; I had to throw it away.

As it turns out, even in February, the tree lawn scavengers were still out in force. I set out some bins and baskets, chairs and dishes, and most everything was picked up. So not too bad, all in all.

My friend in Portland just told me that moving is one of life’s great stressors - along with loosing a spouse or coming down with some horrible disease. Except that people who move bring the stress on themselves.