How (Not) to Move from Maine to Denver

Thank God It’s Denver

Originally uploaded by sogrady.

Since I’m getting a lot of pings asking me how the move was, here it is in two words or less: never again. That may make it seem like the trip was a nightmare, and in truth, parts of it were (particularly the parts that involve navigating a 17 foot truck with trailer), but overall I’m glad I’ve done the cross-country trip at least once.

The trip started out somewhat inauspiciously when my best friend Andrew (whom I now owe big time) and I picked up the U-Haul in Augusta, ME (not the much closer Brunswick as expected) and discovered that my car would be secured to the trailer only by two nylon tethers over the front wheels. The further fact that the U-Haul employees seemed totally unfamiliar with how said straps were actually secured didn’t exactly inspire confidence, considering that they had to hold for a bit over two thousand miles. Even better, the truck had a comforting habit of making a high pitched whine on acceleration, and also featured an occasional but terrifying there-are-loose-parts-in-our-engine rattle.

Things took another, and possibly more dramatic, turn for the worse when we discovered about 20 minutes after setting out Monday morning that our respective iPod/iTrip combinations – which turn the iPod into a mini radio station – only played music accompanied by an overwhelming storm of static. Faced with the prospect of only our own company for some 40 hours in the car, we quickly turned to our only other recourse: cell phones. Unfortunately, after a few hours, people stopped picking up. Apparently hearing about how we threaded our truck/trailer combination into a narrow truck stop gas station stall doesn’t make for particularly scintillating conversation.

But as my parents used to tell me, what cannot be cured must be endured, and so despite a wealth of speculation as to how much it would cost to stop at various places along the way, procure replacement drivers and fly the rest of the way we kept the truck headed west. Mile after mile after mile.

Fortunately for the navigationally impaired – such as yours truly – one can get from the Massachussetts area to Denver using only three different roads: I-90 to I-80 to I-76. The fact that the number of navigational options is directly proportional to the overall interest of the drive didn’t really set in until maybe Cleveland, but by then it was too late. But fortunately by that time, the iPod/iTrip combos made a miraculous – and to this day unexplained – recovery, so we had music.

We ate lunch on Monday somewhere on the Mass pike, then had dinner at Denny’s near Buffalo [1], and finally crashed in a mildew infested Comfort Inn just beyond Cleveland. Tuesday we plowed through the rest of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois (damn your Chicago traffic) and Iowa to crash in Grand Island, Nebraska [2]. Then yesterday we polished off the last 500 miles and arrived, at last, in Denver where I promptly got the truck/trailer stuck near the loading entrance of my new place.

But all in all, I’m counting my blessings. My car made it intact, the truck didn’t break down, it didn’t get robbed, and we hit nothing en route. Not too bad.

So besides the mind-numbing tedium of 2K miles that look absolutely – unrelentingly – similar, I’m glad as I said to have made the trip. Won’t do it again, but glad to have done it once. Along the way I learned and saw some new things (including a full rainbow – check the Flickr pics). Among them:

Facts I Didn’t Know About the Various States:

1. New York has a wine country; miles of highway-side vineyards
2. Pennsylvania borders a great lake
3. Ohio is afflicted with a severe overabundance of red barns
4. Indiana’s primary (sole?) billboard advertising buyers are Notre Dame Football affiliates
5. Illinois is one big traffic jam; stop and go is not limited to the Chicago city limits
6. Iowa: Des Moines is one of the only places on Earth that actually gets further away as you drive towards it
7. Nebraska is home to one of the world’s worst smelling spots ever; a big livestock feed lot near Ogallala that was eye-watering in its stench – at a distance of several miles

Learning experiences aside, however, I’m excited to be back in the office (though not so excited to be unpacking for the next several weeks) and to have been completely unplugged for 4 days (I even managed to not use the Holiday Inn’s wifi). As near as I can determine, everyone’s managed to find me here fine as the number’s been pointed over since last week (and if you use the direct 207 area code number you’ll get a message with the toll free), but if there are any questions just let me know. Otherwise, my immediate goal is to work through all of the respective emails that accumulated in my absence – I’m not letting myself read blogs until that’s done. Look for the regularly scheduled programming to resume tomorrow.

Update: Matthew Weymar pointed out I had a bad second Flickr link. Fixed it up, and thanks for the tip Matthew.

[1] Who knew that you could actually look forward to eating at Denny’s?

[2] There should be some sort of rule on how far off the highway lodging/gas/etc services can be and still have a sign. Finding out only once you’ve exited that the hotel is 5 miles off the road is less than ideal.