On the Road Again...

Big life update… in the first week of April, my little family (husband Chris and our creamsicle cat Paul) packed up all our things and drove from Bellingham, Washington to Asheville, North Carolina! We’d been discussing moving for the past year; my husband, an avid motorcyclist, desired more sunshine and after a lot of back and forth fighting my love of the PNW and desire to be settled, I realized I did, in fact, want another adventure.

It’s no small feat packing up your life and moving across the country. We spent a few months decluttering prior to beginning to pack. I’ve always been extremely sentimental and have a hard time parting with physical items—something I’m working on overcoming—so it took me several waves of purging to pare down to what I actually wanted to keep (and even then, riding on post-move energy, I threw together another box for Goodwill as soon as we arrived in NC, chastising myself for lugging said items all the way over). Despite getting rid of several large pieces of furniture, multiple large bags of clothes, and miscellaneous other items, we still had a lot of stuff.

Moving happened in several stages. After researching, Chris decided our best approach would be to rent space in a commercial truck, vs. renting a U-Haul and driving everything over ourselves. The container for the truck was located about an hour south of Bellingham, which meant we would need to rent a U-Haul, load it up, drive it down, and unload into the container. I won’t go into all the details on our experience with U-Haul. Suffice it to say that their business model stinks. Despite having reserved a 15-ft truck months in advance, checking in days before the move and being told repeatedly by different personnel that it was physically on the lot, they didn’t actually have a truck for us day of move. In the end, they got us a 10-ft truck that luckily fit all our stuff just barely (and even then, that took a lot of back and forth, multiple rounds of misinformation, and hours of delay after pickup time, to get ahold of it).

Finally, we got our stuff packed into the container, and after deciding to spend a final day in Bellingham, said farewell to the little house we’d been so happy in, to my parents, to lovely B-ham, and hit the road! Chris took the lead in his truck, which he’d stuffed full of all the items he didn’t want to risk shipping over in the container. I had the responsibility of transporting Paul—I’d purchased a soft container that took up the entire backseat of my little Volkswagen Golf, and had enough room for blankets and a small litter box (which he was so good about using). The first few days he did pretty good, only yowling for about the first 2 hours or so of the 7-hour daily drives.

The prettiest part of the drive was when we got into northern Idaho and then into Montana. We drove through mountains and evergreens, and since it was a bit more remote, there were not a ton of cars on the road. Paul did really well being transported via his little backpack into the hotel rooms at night, where he would promptly slink around checking out the new digs before curling up on the bed to relax. When we hit the midwest, driving through South Dakota, it got windy. Being me, I had to stop for a bathroom break every few hours and it was a struggle to get my car door open! My hair would whip around and I had to run for the rest room, clutching my sunglass to keep them from being hurdled across the parking lot. The trees had since dwindled away and the landscape became flat and barren, and increasingly desolate. That being said, South Dakota knows how to do a rest stop and I was pretty happy at the consistent opportunities to take advantage of the really nice, well-maintained facilities.

Around this time in the journey, Paul started to get pretty dang upset. The combination of getting used to the car—and thus over the experience—and the noise of the wind made him start to climb up the back of his carrier, yowling, in an attempt to get out. He just would not settle, shoving his little kitty nose against the mesh so much that he rubbed it raw, and stomping across the litter box to dump litter onto his blankets. I finally reached my breaking point and figured it couldn’t hurt (for the both of us) to try something new. So we put him in his backpack, which is large enough for him to stand up in and has a mesh top and sides, and put him in Chris’ truck.

Where, of course, he settled right down. I’m not taking this personally. I’m not…grumble.

So Chris got a cute little road trip buddy (he even opened the top of the backpack and was petting Paul, who remained calm and happily content) and I got some peace to listen to my books on tape! I made my way through Out of the Dark World by Grace Chetwin and the Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley, two favorites from when I was a little girl on road trips with my parents.

We made our way across the Great Plains. I kept thinking of the settlers who had arrived at this place, and tried to make it their home. We spent a night in Murdo, South Dakota, which honestly, was probably my favorite. We stayed at an old, run down motel off the freeway, which was pretty much empty except for maybe five other cars. The room was pretty small, but the bed was clean. We decided to go find some food and drove around trying to find a downtown and came up empty. It was eerily quiet. I think the only other car driving through the town’s streets was one I recognized as a fellow guest at the motel. No one was on the streets, and what few business existed were either closed (it was probably not even 7pm) or vacant. Despite there being clearly a lot of residential houses, very few had any lights on. The first real sign of life we spotted was a group of young kids playing basketball next to a church.

We ended up at one of several gas stations alongside the freeway, where the most activity seemed to be happening, and got a few treats to eat back at our motel. Perhaps the fact that it felt so remote, borderline eerie, is what made me like it so much. That and the hotel was a single floor where we could park right outside the door, meaning it was much easier to cart in all the items Chris carried in his truck (he took up at minimum one cart to get in and out of these hotels, not including my few suitcases and Paul’s items).

As fate would have it, we had inadvertently planned our trip to align with the path of the Solar Eclipse. We tried to avoid the major cities, worried about getting stuck in awful traffic during the eclipse, so that when it happened we found ourselves in Putnam, Kentucky. There at a little bakery/restaurant, I had the best turkey-cranberry croissant sandwich of my life! And, oh yeah, kinda saw the eclipse (we didn’t have glasses so we just stood next to the truck and watched it get dark midday). Still pretty cool.

All together it took us seven days to get to Asheville. We could have made it in six, but on the sixth day we found ourselves still three hours out at a quaint little town. We decided to extend another night, so that we could arrive to our new home in daylight and with some energy. This turned out to be a smart decision, as traffic steadily increased, and we hit some road work closer to Asheville (where I managed to take the detour Chris flagged, and he missed it and got stuck).

We arrived in the late afternoon to our new lovely house and immediately scoped out the food in the area. The next day we had to drive another hour away to go pick up our stuff from the shipping container (yet another ordeal with U-Haul), and were happy to find out that everything survived the journey just fine. Once again, we unpacked into the U-Haul, drove back, and unpacked down our VERY steep driveway. After 9pm we officially had all of our stuff in the house and garage. We spent the next week or so getting settled, even getting pictures on the walls, and are now enjoying our new home, nestled in the dense forest alongside the Blue Ridge Parkway.