It was an eventful trip. We got the moving truck with no problem, and loaded it up Tuesday night. Getting on the road Wednesday morning was easy, and we headed to Portland to meet Mom at Ikea. Unfortunately, the GPS we were using couldn't keep up with how weird Portland's streets are and we got lost for almost half an hour. We spent more time in Ikea than we thought, but it was a truly magical place and we ended up with a lot of nice stuff. Thank you Mom very much for buying half the stuff, we had expected to do it all on our own.
The Ikea stuff went right in to the back of the truck and we rushed off. Traffic around Tacoma, Seattle, and Everett was just plain stupid. How can that many people need to be going somewhere at the same time? But we made it through. No problems at the border, except that the Canadian officer was surprised when we answered the "Do you have any guns?" question with a "No."
We got to our apartment complex a little later than planned, so we didn't have time to unload much of anything (they ask you not to do any moving after 10pm for the quiet hours). We brought up most of the Ikea furniture because we figured we could stay up late putting it together but instead passed out on the floor for the night. Thursday morning I found my new favourite breakfast place (a restaurant called The Pendulum in the SUB - student union building - which serves delicious food and plays blues and jazz all day) and we went back home to bring up as many loads of boxes as we could.
Moving all that in was hard. We have to pull the truck in the Don't Park Here zone temporarily, unload enough stuff to fit the elevator, unlock the building door and move it all to the elevator, call it to the lobby and lock in (the management gave us the key), load it up, bring it to the third floor, lock it again, move it to the 3rd floor lobby, then go prop open another door down an impossibly long hallway and bring stuff from the 3rd floor lobby to our front door, than prop open our front door and bring it all in the apartment. It worked a lot faster and easier than it sounds, but it was a lot of work. We also took a quick trip to our grocery store for food and to get acclimated to the trip and the metric system with shopping for food (also the price differences).
Most of Thursday and all of Friday were spent setting the house in order since we were leaving Saturday at the butt-crack of dawn (not really) and wanted to have it all done before the, kids got there. I'm really happy to say that we got it all finished and I'm really amazed at our apartment. Everything in it is stuff we picked ourselves to be just the way we want, right down to the silverware, dishes, towels, everything. That's never happened to us before; we've usually had to accept what donations friends and family gave us as we went along and never had too much surplus income to get new, nice things. This time our family was overly generous and we sold more than half of what we previously owned so now we have a wonderful apartment that looks like it's from one of the Ikea showrooms.
It's a great apartment; lots of space, more windows than walls, very nice construction and design, just charming. I'll be doing a little video tour of it later for the family that wants to see who might not be visiting too soon.
Today was a little less lucky. We've spent a lot more money than we meant to trying to overcome the various obstacles. We started out a tiny bit later than planned, but ended up with no trouble getting through the border. The USA border officer broke my luggage, but I managed to fix it. Still, he could have just asked me to open it rather than break it open. We ran in to a huge traffic stop due to construction that seemed rather pointless as we passed by, so we ended up so late that we had to spend extra money to change our train tickets. We got to Seattle and had to make a stop at that Ikea because we'd bought lamps we didn't need (how could we know without first seeing the apartment?) and pick up a few pieces to furniture we'd already started but missed one or two items for. That didn't really set us back, but getting the truck back before the train was so close that we had to pay extra and get a taxi instead of walking from the truck drop-off to the train station. Also, gassing the damned thing cost almost as much as renting it. Sheesh.
So now we're on the train, about 40 minutes from Eugene (even though we should have been here 2 hours ago) and hopefully we can get some rest and finally see our kids! It was interesting not having them around, and really helpful for getting the apartment done (I don't think we would have been able to do it at all if we'd had them up there with us), but we really missed them and can't wait to see them.
Now we just hang out in Eugene for a few days seeing friends and family, and then it's the train ride back home for us.
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