This will be the first update in the moving saga of Pollito and Reina. I'm not sure how many installments there will be, but it is always good to start at the beginning.
First of all, you never know how much stuff you have until you try to move. I had experienced this phenomenon before when I moved around in Spain and also when I left Peru, but I had never really tried moving out of my childhood/entire life up to now home. For someone who likes to keep physical copies of memories like artwork, small gifts, photos, trinkets, etc. the moving experience can be somewhat scaring. It took a while to figure out what to do with all the things that I have. I had donation piles, recycle piles, bags of trash, piles of items to be packed for the airplane, items to be packed into boxes, and items to be left at home. All of these piles had constantly changing contents as I tried to figure out what went where and as I remembered the memories attached to each piece. Once I finished with everything in my room, I had to move on to items that had been stored away in the garage and spare bedroom for when I finally moved out.
Pollo on the other hand had to figure out which half of his possessions to take on the airplane with him and what to leave in boxes to ship later. The end. Not fair.
Pollo's company gave us relocation money and we originally thought to pack and ship our items and our 2 pieces of furniture, but we found that moving companies give you a certain amount of space for a certain amount of money, and there was no way we were going to use all of it so it would be akin to wasting free money. Through a clever scheme of Pollo's we got Macy's to ship all of our wedding gifts to our new future house and we found that using a shipping service like Fedex or UPS would be a lot cheaper to ship the rest of our items. We also took advantage of Southwest's two free checked bag policy to take everything that we would need immediately. With the money we saved from these tactics we would be able to buy new furniture so we didn't have to worry about our two little pieces from Oakland.
Although we didn't ship household goods, we did end up shipping our car across the country because we didn't have the time or the desire to drive it across at the end of the particularly horrendous winter that had swept the eastern side of the US. We followed a friend's advice and used United Van Lines to ship the car. Pollo also learned that you should check out a moving company on the Department of Transportation's website on moving companies. With their Department of Transportation number or their name you can check various safety statistics before you ship off all your worldly possessions in a random van with a random driver. The Department of Transportation also has a website devoted to moving, which is currently not accessible. We were very happy with the car moving company and their responsiveness. We shipped out our car two weeks before we needed it and hoped that it would arrive neither too early nor too late.
After spending a week in Denver for Training Pollo and took a late night flight to Philadelphia and United Van Lines delivered our car right to our hotel the very next morning. Perfect timing! We packed it to the gills before heading off on an exploratory trip through Philadelphia, on to Pennsylvania Dutch country and then down to Maryland to visit Carlos's aunt and uncle.
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| Our little California car all ready to take on the East Coast |
